A stage of her own

A stage of her own

As the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford opens again after a major facelift, Gillian Darley uncovers the story of its pioneering architect Elisabeth Scott, who paved the way for other women to join the profession

In January 1928 Elisabeth Scott won the international competition for the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. The only woman in a field of more than 70, she was still too young to vote. Yet three eminent architects, two English, one American, had picked her to design one of England's most prestigious public buildings. The press went mad. "Girl Architect Beats Men", "Unknown Girl's Leap to Fame", "Doctor's Daughter"– and much more in a similar vein. One journalist wrote that he was expecting to meet a woman of the "extreme type, as strong direct and bold as the design", only to find her reticence (and femininity) baffling.

Scott's quiet determination had already surfaced in her insistence upon a formal education in her later teens (the other girls in the Scott family of 10 were home-schooled). Her brother Bernard, just a year older than she, died at Vimy Ridge in 1916 and her next move, rarely mentioned later, was to become secretary to an (unidentified) "famous Labour leader" – perhaps politics seemed a purposeful way for her to deal with his death. However, her father's family, the Bodleys and Scotts, were prominent in medicine and architecture, and in 1919, aged 21, she embarked on the latter career.

The Architectural Association first admitted women to its courses in 1917, although the head of the school considered their abilities lay "in decorative and domestic architecture rather than the planning of buildings 10 to 12 stories high". In this atmosphere of determinedly low expectations Scott gained her diploma in 1924.

Entering architectural competitions young ran in the Scott family: her cousin Giles Gilbert won the commission for Liverpool's Anglican cathedral aged 22 and Elisabeth had tested the water already with a design for a fire station in Newcastle. If architects wanted to seize the initiative, then competitions were (and are) the best way to do so. The 1870s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre had inexplicably burned down in 1926. It was an overwrought pile designed by an obscure pair, Dodgshun & Unsworth, and paid for by the Flower family, local brewers. Almost Bavarian with its rash of turrets, a scattering of "Old English" trimmings easily satisfied those who preferred the more familiar.

Once she had recovered from the shock of finding herself shortlisted, Scott spent every spare moment outdoors, walking, mulling over this most unusual site for a theatre, an entirely open riverbank. It offered her reflections and unimpeded views. She didn't have to waste time worrying about squeezing the building into a street or fitting in with Tudor buildings – in Stratford-upon-Avon mostly Victorian "restorations". Her architectural response, created in four hard weeks, was a layered, strongly horizontal design, broken only by the dominant fly tower that expressed Scott's insistence that "every structural feature introduced should serve a practical purpose". For her, that was modern architecture.

After the win, the clients proposed that Scott and her colleagues spend a year researching contemporary theatre design. In early 1928 she and Maurice Chesterton (previously her employer, now her architectural partner), William Bridges-Adams, the forceful artistic director of the theatre (and architect manqué), and the redoubtable Archibald (Archie) Flower, representing the board, toured Germany to pick up, in her words "the best and newest ideas".

Once back, Scott was guest of honour of the London and National Society for Women's Service (LNSWS). Now that the full franchise was in sight (to become law that July), the focus of the Junior Council had shifted to the prospects for "students who wish to take up a career". Scott's success was a notable inspiration. Now her hosts hoped that she would be known "as a 'gifted architect' and not as a 'gifted woman architect'". In her reply, Scott extolled the beauty of the Stratford site (she had not yet encountered the trials of building on waterlogged ground) and hoped that her building would be much more than a stage, "a place where people could really enjoy themselves". She told her audience that the Germans had technical know-how in matters such as organising complicated scene changes but, better still, they emphasised the conviviality, the excitement, of theatregoing with "spacious foyers . . . very unlike the cramped conditions in London theatres".

John (Jock) Shepherd, also from the AA, joined Scott and Chesterton's architectural practice. Looking back after her death in 1972, Geoffrey Jellicoe considered that "Scott provided the initiative, Chesterton the administration and Shepherd the flair." From the very moment of her win, Scott's role as sole designer was questioned but in a 1936 interview she reiterated the collaborative nature of the project, typical of complex architectural commissions: "While mine was the design chosen for the theatre, the actual work has been carried out by my partners and myself as a firm." She readily gave credit where it was due. Another AA friend and contemporary, New Zealand-born Alison Sleigh married Shepherd and, a gifted draughtsman, was responsible for much of the detail; years later she illustrated John Summerson's Georgian London.

Janet Pott, née Fletcher, worked in Scott's office from 1929. Interviewed in 1984 by the architectural historian Lynne Walker she remembered what a tremendous struggle the Stratford job had been. They had to master the intricacies of "stagecraft", handle innumerable specialist contractors and deal with an exigent board. Happily George Bernard Shaw was unfailingly helpful, reminding them about crucial things such as sight lines from the back of the gallery. Bridges-Adams "had interesting ideas on stage development" but believed he should have designed the theatre himself.

In July 1929 the foundation stone was laid with Masonic ritual, accompanied by libations of oil, corn and wine. Six hundred freemasons in full regalia marched through town. No woman had ever taken part in this ritual. Scott's prominence, however unwarranted, was already inspirational. Judith Ledeboer, a leading postwar architect, changed her career path immediately on hearing of Scott's win.

In January 1931, Scott took Pott to a memorable meeting organised by the LNSWS. Dame Ethel Smythe and Virginia Woolf shared the platform. Woolf's A Room of One's Own had been published in 1929 and she reminded some 200 young women, "well dressed keen & often beautiful", that they were "practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions . . . you have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men."

Once the theatre was complete in 1932, reactions were extreme. The noisiest barracking came from 75-year-old Sir Edward Elgar. The theatre was "unspeakably ugly and wrong", "an insult to human intelligence" and the (unknown to him) hapless architect was "that awful woman". He implacably refused to take part in the opening ceremony (his Faust was not suitable, so the objection to the new theatre proved an invaluable face-saver). At the time Bridges-Adams distanced himself from the crusty views of the Master of the King's Musick – "If you take as a personal worry what every elderly buffer says about a public building, you will end by going mental" – but his tendency to apply hindsight grew and, despite his own responsibility for key decisions on the auditorium and stage, he would later become an invidious critic of the theatre, sniping from the shadows.

The Masonic ceremonies around the foundation stone paled into insignificance besides the folderol of the official opening on 23 April 1932, broadcast and relayed live to the United States (from whence came most of the funding). Some 100,000 people came to see the Prince of Wales arrive by monoplane (self-piloted), to declare the building open, receive a key from Scott – a modern figure in her cloche hat and neatly cropped hair – and attend part of the opening production of Henry IV and then fly off again, well before the end of the performance.

Just how modernist was her design? Scott's winning drawing showed a masonry building (Cotswold stone) – a far cry from white rendered concrete. However the assessors preferred brick, a significant alteration that allowed for Nordic boldness and dexterous external craftsmanship, which was revealed after the recent refurbishment. The columnist Beachcomber's "new Soviet Barracks at Stratford", the building that conservative locals called "the jam factory", although it was euphorically reviewed by architectural progressives such as Maxwell Fry, was a pretty tame animal by international standards.

By 1966, when he was writing the Warwickshire volume of his Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner saw the theatre, by now renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, as very dated but allowed that it had been "a radical statement in England, remarkable in a place of such strong and live traditions." Members of the progressive Design and Industries Association took Gropius to see it in the mid-30s. He saw nothing modernist about the building. Pevsner, one of his guides, found it "embarrassing to see his embarrassment".

In architectural practice, Scott enjoyed intelligent women clients. In 1929 she began to work on the Marie Curie Hospital in Hampstead, starting with the conversion of 2 Fitzjohns Avenue. The pioneering radiation centre was solely for women, organised and staffed by women. In July 1930 Stanley Baldwin unlocked the door with a key presented by "Miss E Scott, ARIBA". In the following years she expanded the cancer hospital to treat 700 women a year. It was bombed flat in 1944.

Scott remained left-leaning politically, but kept that, like much else, private. Among her numerous cousins were radicals such as Ralph Wright, the literary editor of the Daily Worker and mentor of her brother Humfry who lived in Russia for six years, working as an editor for the Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR. In the early 30s she and her doctor brother Tom visited Humfry in Moscow and returned "very impressed by what they saw" according to their niece, Ursula Bowlby. On the long list of International Brigade fatalities in Spain in 1937, Humfry stands out. While his British comrades gave places of departure such as Hartlepool or Dagenham, his was Russia.

Architectural practice was threatened by both economic depression and political forebodings and now Scott had practical problems too. She had married George Richards, her sister-in-law's brother, despite strong misgivings from family and friends. He was, probably, the same George Richards of Bournemouth listed as bankrupt in the Times in 1936. He apparently never worked and is only remembered as a "professional letter writer". Among his subjects of concern aired in the Times were cooking, the Third Programme, fresh air on trains and relations with the Soviet Union. His style was rebarbative and rambling.

Meanwhile Scott worked on. The Stratford board gratifyingly recalled her practice to carry out alterations and extensions. But in autumn 1938 she requested prompt settlement for work on the Fawcett Building – a polite nod in grey brick to Basil Champneys's sunny red Arts and Crafts work at Newnham College Cambridge – since they had outstanding fees "and we are somewhat apprehensive this may be awkward in the event of a war. Doubtless this will seem very silly next week when Hitler has climbed down, but meanwhile it would be a great relief to our feelings if there was something in the Bank."

Two years later she wrote to Philippa Strachey (who had masterminded her 1928 celebration dinner) commiserating about the bombing of the Women's Service Building on Marsham Street. Scott's architectural partners, Shepherd and John Breakwell, who had also worked on the theatre, were now Army Engineers. Scott was struggling to secure licences for materials (especially cement) for a new senior school in Northallerton, Yorkshire.

Although she continued to practise, not retiring until she was 70, Scott was largely forgotten when she joined Bournemouth Town Council architects' department in the late 50s. Few of her colleagues had any idea who the quiet woman was, busy designing a theatre for the pier in the seaside town in which she had been born.

Once celebrated by fellow architects and critics, lionised by feminists, the subject of a thousand newspaper articles, the self-effacing Elisabeth Scott's success in the 1927 competition transformed prospects for women in the architectural profession in the 20th century. In the end the only loser was Scott herself, unable to live up to her perceived early promise, the victim of her own success.

reticence 과묵한

baffling 저해하는

determinedly 단호히

inexplicably 말로 설명하기 힘든

overwrought  잔뜩 긴장한

turret 성 꼭대기 탑

shortlist 최종 리스트, 리스트에 오르다.

 mull something over ~에 대해 심사숙고하다

unimpeded  방해받지 않는

redoubtable  경외할만한

conviviality 기분 좋음, 주흥

theatregoing  영화관자주가는 사람

foyer 현관, 로비

reiterate 했던 말을 반복하다.

draughtsman 제도사, 데생화가

intricacy 복잡한 사항

exigent 위급한 급박한

unfailingly 영락없이

unwarranted 불필요한

hitherto 지금까지

hapless  불운한

implacably  무자비하게

crusty  신경질적인, (식품) 딱딱한 껍질이 있는

buffer  완충장치, 

invidious 비위에 거슬리는, 부당한

snip 가위로 자르다. 

folderol  시시한것

whence ~한곳에서

cloche  여성용 모자

masonry 석조

assessor 평가자

refurbishment 정비사업

left-leaning 좌파의

Brigade 단체,여단

comrade 동무 동지

foreboding 불기한 예감

misgivings 불안, 걱정, 염려

rebarbative 호감이 안가는

rambling 두서없이

gratifyingly 기쁘게 만족하며

mastermind 지휘자

commiserate 위로를 표하다

lionize 사람을 명사대우하다

self-effacing 자기를 내세우지 않는

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/elisabeth-scott-royal-shakespeare-theatre