The mirror of life.

The power and presence of performance buildings -- whether theatres, opera houses, concert halls or churches -- is reinforced both by the ephemeral drama onstage and the social spectacle offstage. In providing a forum for the expression of the human spirit they also act as a focus for celebration and cohesion.

At the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, in 1747, Dr Johnson delivered the following prologue to the assembled audience:

The stage but echoes back the public voice. The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please must please to live.

In Johnson's view, the theatre was like a mirror held up to life. In the wider context of the evolution of dramatic arts, this mirror can be seen to reflect the changes of image and identity that have occurred over time in the presentation of drama: the great open amphitheatre, the strolling player, the intimacy and opulence of court theatre, to the picture frame theatre, the converted bus and the renovated music hall. But this mirror reflects in two directions, both inwards to the choreographed internal drama and outwards to the society which creates the buildings to house this drama, through the processes of architecture and design.

If the drama is the mirror then theatre architecture is the frame in which performances live, but the nature of the frame can vary enormously. Theatres have tended to be designed in formulaic batches by specialists, such as Frank Matcham who designed over 160 in Britain, and Fellner and Helmer who between 1870 and 1910 produced 165 buildings across Europe from Barcelona to Odessa. There is also the familiar problem associated with all such intensely inward-looking building typologies (a problem which is even more acute with those extreme black boxes, cinemas) in that their relationship with the wider fabric of towns and cities is sometimes uneasy. Every provincial town centre has its share of unlovable behemoths, all faded gilt, peeling wedding cake plaster and bulky flytowers. Even London's two most significant performance buildings, Lasdun's National Theatre and Barry's Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, have often been quietly decried as undistinguished when compared with the holistic dynamism of Scharoun's Philharmonie and the Neo-Baroque splendour of Garnier's Paris Opera. And it could be argued that the real drama of theatre architecture is in the moment of suspended disbelief in a darkened auditorium, when at best all the average audience cares to register about their immediate surroundings beyond the spectacle of the stage is whether the seats are comfortable or whether they have enough leg room. .

Yet, through history some architects have responded to the broader challenges of creating memorable spaces for performance. Think, for example of van de Velde's Werkbund Exhibition Theatre in Cologne, or the brilliant conversion of a circus into the Grosses Schauspielhaus by Hans Poelzig. It may be tempting to regard architecture as an extension of theatre, but as Edward Gordon Craig wrote in a letter to the Dutch architect H. T. Wijdeveld, `Theatre is another sort of world to architecture'. However, collaboration between individuals from both disciplines can bear extraordinary fruit. Walter Gropius' radical, stylised design for Total-Theater in 192 7 intended `to draw the spectator into the drama' was the outcome of collaboration with revolutionary producer Erwin Piscator. Another historic partnership was Otto Bruckwald's with Richard Wagner, at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus of 1876. Here Wagner's conceptual brief extended beyond simply providing a shell for staging. Instead by the interaction of a set of physical variables (democratic fan of seating, sunken orchestra in the `mystic abyss' of the pit, darkened auditorium) he consecrated the ritual of performance into a sublime form of expression. In some ways, Bayreuth is more church than theatre (a repository for the gospel according to Wagner), but where churches are instilled with a monumentality founded on spirituality, theatres ache to be colonised and used, to be settings for social as well as dramatic spectacle.

At La Scala in Milan, the huge auditorium with its tiers of boxes originally acted like a great coral reef, to be used and inhabited by the box holders, who were given licence to decorate their boxes according to individual taste. From these Baroque origins, this notion is behind Garnier's massive gilt salons and staircases, for public promenading, and extends through to the London National Theatre, with its generous public mingling spaces, intimate nooks for assignations and above all a marvellous engagement with the river Thames beyond and the wider city. At most times of the day, particularly in the evenings, Lasdun's spacious foyers are full of life bustle and spectacle, of people seeing and being seen.

Walking around the magnificent new opera house at Glyndebourne, there is a palpable sense of anticipation of how it will burst into bloom on the first night in a fascinating and dramatic interplay of space, function and ceremony. At a time when most Westernised societies are buckling and fragmenting and we are all encouraged to pursue solitary diversions, safely removed from the public realm, the role of performance buildings in promoting social cohesiveness and enlightenment through the myriad human joys of collective entertainment cannot be underestimated.