How did the idea for the Bridge Theatre come about?

We ran the National Theatre (NT) for 12 years, and a while ago we started producing shows there that could have a commercial life – like War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and One Man, Two Guv’nors – and we had the obvious idea that rather than hand them over to a third party commercial producer, we could actually set up a producing unit within the NT to rent to the West End theatres, Broadway around the world, putting on the productions ourselves. We felt we could look after them better and all our profits would go back to the NT.

So we became intimately aware of the age and nature of the buildings in London's West End. We thought, ‘If you could, how would you make these theatres better? Could they be more comfortable and more 21st century for audiences? Could you improve the backstage areas and give the artists better facilities?’

This conjecture led us quite naturally to the idea of building something new, because the constraints of a listed building – on narrow footprints, with height-protected views across London – make them really hard to adapt. While people like Cameron MacKintosh have done wonderful things with old theatres, there's always a limit to things like adding circulation space and how many toilets you can have.

The auditoriums in the West End have the picture frame Proscenium arch, which was the style during our great boom of theatre building in the late 19th early 20th centuries. However, this wasn't our most vibrant time for the writing of drama. As a result, now we've got a vast majority of commercial playhouses that are enshrining an aesthetic which is actually quite constraining on writing, particularly modern writing. If one thinks about where a lot of dynamic productions come from, like the Young Vic, they are very often using formats which cannot be replicated in the West End.

So we thought, ‘would it be possible to build outside the West End on a commercial basis and what would it look like?’ Theatre audiences in London have grown by 25 per cent since the beginning of the century, so it was really obvious to us that there is a demand to build a new one, but with more flexibility built in.”

Why did you decide to have a modular, prefabricated auditorium?

The architect Steve Tompkins and I have done about eight projects together and known each other for 18 years. We’d been talking for some time about what a new theatre would be like. Every time I found a new opportunity for one, I’d ask him to take a look, until eventually he said, ‘Nick, you can't afford to do feasibility for every site.’

He said why don’t you let us have a think with [design director Roger Watts] about the perfect auditorium. Around the same time, we came across an opportunity at the Tower Bridge site.

“We want to build more than one theatre, so we approached the design team with the idea that if we could build an auditorium in modular form that is replicable and permanent there might be a market. We imagined that designers, directors, actors and producers could sit in the seats and see what it feels like, and then maybe want to have one themselves. That's what we've done.

We reached out to Tait, whose business is in music and entertainment. They do big shows, like Cirque du Soleil. With Haworth Tompkins they came up with the perfect auditorium, with galleries built in steel and a stage that's constructed of very permanent-seeming but lightweight rostra, which are supported on a beautifully slender but highly engineered structure underneath latticework, which is incredibly quick to put up and dismantle. This stuff is used in big rock shows, where 20,000 seats need to go up and down in five hours. Rather than mechanising the whole thing, this can be put up and down by three people.

How do you hope writers will respond to the space?

Writers are really in demand at the moment as a result of long-form television, which is good. I was recently with the dramatist Simon Stevens, and he said he gets inspired by a space and will write something prescriptive that fits the format. With the flexibility of The Bridge Theatre, our hope is that writers will respond to the space and directors will interpret it in different ways. It’s a great deal looser for them creatively. We fully expect they ask something we never thought of, which will give us the exciting challenge of imagining how we give the space even further life.

Is the London Theatre Company planning its next theatre?

We’re planning a second one, elsewhere in London, and are just starting the process. I can’t talk about it at the moment, but that would be opening in the next few years.