138 Halsey Street
The architect and 138 Halsey Street: Gordon Moller
For most of its existence ATC has been peripatetic, staging productions in venues around town because it didn’t have one of its own. That all changed in September 2016, when the distinctly showbiz six-hundred and-seventy-seat ASB Waterfront Theatre was formally opened by Auckland mayor Len Brown. Built as a public-private partnership and costing millions, ATC’s permanent venue was designed by Gordon Moller ONZM with BVN Architecture.
Synchronicity was involved. Back in 2011, consultants hired by the Auckland Council concluded that the performing-arts sector needed a mid-sized, six-hundred-ish-seater venue. At the time, the university’s Maidment Theatre seated 450, Q Theatre between 280 and 460. SkyCity Theatre accommodated 700 but it had all but been withdrawn from use. Over at ATC’s Balmoral headquarters, where architect Gordon Moller had just been elected chair of the board, staff perennially scrambled around looking for spaces to hire. Further, if a show took off, ATC couldn’t always negotiate an extension, so box-office take couldn’t always be maximised. In 2010, for example, the Michael Hurst-directed Cabaret was performed in a spiegeltent erected on the waterfront, because no other venue was available. It cost $800,000 to stage. It pulled the crowds but the charming tent was nevertheless too small for ATC to push the numbers through and make much of a return. ‘We wanted to control our own destiny,’ says Moller
ATC mobilised. The $36-million-plus theatre project was spearheaded by its general manager Lester McGrath, who along with Moller and others commenced the hunt for possible sites, rejecting a few. Mercury Theatre: significant upgrade required, stage too small and unable to be enlarged due to the road around the back. St James Theatre: dilapidated condition, stage not big enough unless the property behind acquired. Mid City arcade; looked to combine forces with the then venue-less Q Theatre but costs blew out to $60 million. The council was keen to bolster its arty precinct in the Aotea Centre environs but by then the waterfront and the Wynyard Quarter had hoved into Moller’s view: ‘We were keen to come down to the waterfront because we wanted to broaden our relationship with the public. We wanted to actually make our theatre more accessible.’
The director of Moller Architects had an in. He sat on the technical advisory group of Eke Panuku Development, which aside from managing council-owned land and real estate has as its bailiwick urban regeneration, including of the waterfront area around Wynyard Quarter. Moller and co were soon in discussions with ATC’s bankers ASB, which was building new quarters there, next to an unspoken-for piece of council land on Halsey Street. Moller started working up ideas with ASB’s architects BVN — ‘good guys’, he says, ‘but we realised pretty quickly that they didn’t know how to design a theatre. And I suppose we sort of did.’ By then Moller Architects had designed the until-recently-named Brierley Theatre for Wellington College, the Lodge Theatre in Geraldine and the aforementioned SkyCity Theatre.
McGrath and ATC artistic director Colin McColl’s brief to Moller was for an intimate theatre for the spoken word, one in which however far from the stage patrons might be, they would still feel in on the action — interpreted by Moller to mean that those in the back row could see the whites of the actors’ eyes. Standing in the auditorium in front of the stage, Moller claps his hands to demonstrate how he satisfied the requirements: the reverberation has a delay of less than a second — ideal for the voice, he says, and made possible by reflecting sound off the side walls and ceiling with strategically positioned steel panels, then absorbing the sound at the rear via ribbed cedar backed by absorbent material (AKA a Helmholtz resonator). With the cedar panelling Moller also referenced the architectural vernacular in the form of the weatherboards of the once typical New Zealand house. (In a similar vein, Moller refers to the wide stairs outside the auditorium as ‘the sheep run’. The balustrades are a line of vertical timber battens rather than glass — a tactic, Moller says, to make ‘elderly people feel safe’.) For intimacy’s sake Moller made the auditorium wider (24 metres) and shallower (18 metres from front stage to back wall) than usual, and curved, with no centre aisles, ‘because to my way of thinking, that’s the natural way you gather around players.’ The configuration also enables actors to better sense the audience.
And sometimes to imagine there are more of them out there than there actually are. When Moller asked McColl what colour he wanted for the auditorium seats, the ATC director said not ubiquitous burgundy. From empirical research Moller had noticed that if seats are differently coloured, even if a venue is only half full, it seems busier. ‘I got a seating plan and four colour pencils and went for it,’ he says. Another of Moller’s ruses also upped the all-round liveliness and collective yahooing: the tiered flooring is timber, which amplifies the sound of foot-stomping during ovations.
Moller was not entirely persuaded by one element of McGrath and McColl’s brief. While there was some talk about having a more flexible stage for experimental theatre, the pair ordered up a proscenium arch. Moller mounted a challenge, along the lines that a proscenium would essentially create a European theatre. ‘They said, “That’s what we do.”’ While McGrath and McColl were unyielding, Moller says he did manage to build a little flexibility into the stage, which is big — 15 metres across and 12 metres deep, large enough to accommodate, for example, the corps of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, which if they were to hire the theatre could make use of the sixty-two fly lines above the sprung floor, and the twenty-four trapdoors under it. The proscenium frame can be adjusted, and the stage can also be pushed out into the auditorium.
Moller was knocked back on another of his ideas. ‘I got very carried away at one stage… when we were thinking about a second little mini theatre.’ The space Moller had in mind for intimate stagings eventually became a lighting store. Moller did a series of drawings but ‘Lester said “It’ll never sell, we won’t be able to make money out of it.” So I got kiboshed on that one.
For a man who is used to working with big budgets in a few different currencies — Moller Architects designed Auckland’s most obviously masculine of buildings (the Sky Tower) and other projects in Seoul, Chicago and Oman — Moller can be thrifty. While he lined the back of the balustrades in the gallery with leather, ‘because that’s where the posh people are’, he also saw the value in Scandi knockoffs. By the time it got to fitting out the theatre’s green room, where actors relax, the furniture budget was a lean $7000. McColl told Moller it was essential that actors have something to snooze on. The architect headed to Nood and found sofas for $3000 each, but the salesperson told him to come back the following week, when they’d be discounted to $1300. Six years on, the bargains in the green room are still holding up well, says Moller.
Text from A Backstage Pass, written Frances Walsh and published by Penguin Random House New Zealand. Click here for more information on the book and to purchase a copy.
Images above by Simon Devitt.