Abstract
The claim that theatre is not only a live art but a communal experience that shares important historic ties to the life of cities has been attracting attention over recent years. The history of one of London's best-loved venues – the Young Vic – reveals an especially close bond between the theatre, its urban landscape and the communities living on and around The Cut, in SE1. Built in 1970 on a Second World War bomb-site, the Young Vic was conceived as a ‘cheep and cheerful’ temporary project that would act as an off-shoot of the National Theatre and an artistic refuge for the young people of Lambeth and Southwark. This analysis of the (re)building of architect Bill Howell's theatre by the firm Haworth Tompkins Architects in 2005–06 is interested in how work to rehabilitate the theatre unearthed local sub-plots and buried narratives of the city as the architects, the artist Clem Crosby and the theatre's staff cut across disciplinary boundaries to collaborate on the new scheme. Charting the various stages of the (re)building, the article views theatre history and past architectural practice as having stimulated alternative ways of remembering, which include, beside instances of involuntary memory, the techniques of montage, Merzbau and ‘rememorization’ as well as a deliberate attempt to trace, re-frame and re-connect the relationship between theatre and society.
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