It has been called “the heartbeat” of the National Theatre. Housed in a Brutalist building on London’s South Bank, the Studio was founded in 1984 as a five-year experiment, with the aim of developing new work that was not in the public eye. “Until we started the Studio,” said Peter Gill, its founder, “there was a sense that the National was not for people like the new writer.”
Forty years later, the Studio – now home to the New Work department – is responsible for many of National’s hits. It was here in this building that the team perfected three of the four shows up for best play at this year’s Olivier Awards: Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down , Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue , and James Graham’s award-winning Dear England . At the entrance, a blackboard grid unfurls writers on attachment and artists in workshops. It is a lab, a refuge, a place where questions can be asked and ambitions expanded, with the time and space they need.
There were two men running around with a ladder over their heads, and Tom Morris shouted, “It’s going to be great!”
So what happens inside? My visit begins in the boarded script room with Rufus Norris, the National’s artistic director, who is nearing the end of his 10-year tenure. “I’m the first director of the National Theatre who doesn’t have a literary background,” he says. “I didn’t go to university. So this has always been much more of a home for me than perhaps my predecessors.”
Norris uses the building to perfect scripts and explore staging, most recently for Nye, the play about the birth of the NHS. “I went through 41 drafts with Tim Price,” he says, referring to Nye’s writer. Their sessions also explored the show’s hospital setting — moving “lots of sloppy beds” around to save time during rehearsals.
The theatre’s greatest hits have all been put to the test here, from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to One Man, Two Guvnors. “I came to the very first workshop for War Horse,” says Norris. “Two guys were running around with a ladder over their heads and co-director Tom Morris said, ‘This is going to be amazing!’”
As in any laboratory, some experiments fail rather than flourish, even some of Norris’s own cherished ideas. “This is also a place where projects can die,” he says disarmingly, going on to describe “the best sharing of a show that we didn’t do.” This was a work based on songs by “a remarkable, now deceased rock musician. It was fantastic — but not in the eyes of either of the two people who own the rights.”
Nina Steiger, head of theatre development, takes me around the archive and says, “It’s completely open to the public, free – years of theatre history beautifully captured.” When Anupama Chandrasekhar was in residence, Norris says, she watched films of shows written for the Olivier stage. “You see [echoes of] Amadeus and other works in her play The Father and the Murderer.”
A writer’s first encounter with the building is often a six-week assignment. “Paid, of course!” says Steiger. “They get a room and a computer, and the community of other artists — at a crucial time in their careers.” The current crop comes out for a chat on the landing: collegiality is a big part of what the Studio is about. “There’s this idea that writers are solitary,” says playwright Tamsin Oglesby. “But I don’t think we are.”
Each writer gets something different out of their time here. For Sam Grabiner, it’s a blessing to get some peace and quiet. “Up until about three weeks ago,” he says, “I wrote in my bedroom, about two feet from my bed. I live with eight people, and six of them are very noisy.” Grabiner, currently the National’s writer in residence, finds his room attractive and productive: he has two desks for separate projects and has brought his grandfather’s old Charlie Chaplin statuette with him. “If you could imagine how a writer’s life could be structured and sustained,” he says, “this is what it would look like.”
During the pandemic – which Studio Head Rachel Twigg calls “the toughest time in theatre history” – the team conceived the Generate programme, offering a third of their workshop resources to artists and makers outside of London. As Norris says: “This is an important research and development hub for the talent pipeline. We’re blessed to have this and it’s our duty to share it.”
Twigg takes me to a Generate workshop, where Peter O’Rourke is developing a show for his puppet company Cubic Feet. The puppets are already alarmingly alive, all blue hair and mesmerizing eyes. “It’s been a great few days of trying out ideas,” O’Rourke says. “My work is not script-driven, so having the puppeteers in the room is a great resource.”
Is there an art to finding the right moment for a Studio development slot? “The sweet spot,” says Twigg, “is not so close to rehearsal that your discoveries can’t be implemented, but not too early either: during the Post-it period, you don’t need people in the room.” Just beyond the Post-its sit Bert and Nasi, British/French physical theatre makers. The pair are thrilled with their high-ceilinged space. “We usually start in quite a small room,” Nasi explains. “Suddenly we can see things a bit bigger.”
Related: ‘You Don’t Need to Be Invited – Do It Yourself’: Beth Steel on Her Working-Class Epic
I have a quick lunch with Beth Steel, radiant in parakeet colors. Like many writers, her first contact with the New Work department was to turn in a hopeful script. “You don’t have to attach your resume,” she says. “You just have to write your play and send it in. I remember getting that paragraph back in response. Did I burst into tears? Yes, of course. It was enormously encouraging. You don’t write into a void.”
Gradually, her work reached Steiger’s radar. “You can’t get anywhere as a writer without someone supporting you. I found that with Nina.” Steel’s time as writer in residence resulted this year in the searing Till the Stars Come Down , which follows a fraught family wedding. “We had the confidence to do the piece in the round because we had done a workshop before the full rehearsal. Bijan Sheibani, the director, started walking around the room and said, ‘We can put it on a revolver.’ That was so nourishing — the revolver becomes the wedding ring, the cosmos.”
Being in residence also gave Steel a salary (“Money is one of the great unspoken things in theatre”) and access to the wider life of the National. “Going to partners’ meetings and hearing brilliant theatre minds like Lyndsey Turner or Dominic Cooke analyse a play opened up other sides of my brain. It was the university experience I never had.”
Related: ‘We’ve messed up some heads’: Roy Williams on tackling a divided country in Death of England
Development can expand ideas even as it distills their expression. Clint Dyer, the National’s associate artistic director, explains that the first draft of the monologue piece Death of England had a lot of characters. Only after experimenting with a full cast did he and co-writer Roy Williams refine it into a single voice. “Because we were able to edit it,” Dyer says, “the foundations of the piece are deep.”
I sit with Steiger and Twigg in their shared office near the entrance to the building. Most nights, they’re on the road with their team, visiting venues large and small across the country. “I see ridiculous things,” Steiger says. “That’s where you find talent. We’re all looking for different things. For me, it’s often about following the development of a writer. We’re looking for artists who are going to fill the Dorfman Stage at the National in three to five years.” For Twigg, the rhythm of the building feels like the steady beat of the tide. Each week brings a new series of workshops, culminating in a Friday “sharing.” She recalls a sharing of Alexander Zeldin’s heartbreaking play Love. “Alex said, ‘I’ve got three different endings to show you.’ It was devastating to watch the actors come up with the idea of Anna Calder-Marshall’s character, as Alex said, ‘walking through the woods where she’s going to die.’ It was absolutely beautiful.”
I’m about to leave. And next year Norris, who will be succeeded by Indhu Rubasingham, will be too. “She’s used the Studio a lot,” says Dyer. “She’s a veteran.” Steel remembers running into her there. “It was nice to meet Indhu,” she says, “and for her to say, ‘What do you want to write? Let’s do it.’ That’s never happened to me before!”