Rob Halliday reports . . .
Because there is a certain expectation that a theatre will be in the middle of a town, it’s quite a surprise when said taxi turns right and up a big, steep hill, past what are clearly a number of other civic buildings of the ‘70s, then stops outside what feels almost like a fairytale castle perched right on top with spectacular views out over fields and mountains. It is a spectacular location.
Take your eyes away from that view (which the locals wryly note is sometimes much less visible on a blustery Welsh day than on the beautiful July day of this visit), make a half turn and you get a chance to inspect the theatre building, fresh from its three-year, £50-million makeover. Compare what’s there now to photographs from the past and you can see that the building’s broad outline and core materials, principally the red brick, are the same: this is an upgrade rather than a complete demolition and rebuild. But the foreboding towers flanking a low undercroft entrance seem to have gone, replaced by a big, timber-framed glass façade oversailed by a high canopy designed to provide some shelter in winter and shade in summer; this actually an extension bringing the front of the building forward. You can see right in; from inside, you can see right out, the front of the canopy supported on steel beams so as to have fewer verticals to interrupt the view. It feels of this time now, rather than from 1976 – 50 years ago – when it opened.
The ambition of that original project was pretty remarkable, particularly through the lens of five decades of diminishing public funding for the arts. Remember, though, that this was the same year the ambitious National Theatre in London (finally) opened.
Different times. At Clwyd, the ambition was not just to create a theatre for the nearest town, Mold, but a regional arts centre serving all of North Wales, perhaps even nearby England too!
Almost willed into existence, it seems, by T. M. Haydn Rees, then running Clwyd County Council, it feels like the ambition was to be an exemplar of the kind of regional rep that was common then – with a theatre, studio and workshop space, though, weirdly, no rehearsal room. Perhaps that, and the absence of the 1,000-seat concert hall for which plans exist next door, suggest that even in the heady early ‘70s there were limits to budgets. The building was the crown on the top of a civic centre of buildings, from law courts to library, running up the hill.
It was also more than just a theatre. The building’s west side housed a technical training centre for theatre and TV, including a studio ultimately used by local independent TV company HTV into the ‘90s, after which the theatre company expanded into the rest of the building. Clwyd continued – and continues still – as a company producing its own work, through artistic directors George Roman, Toby Robertson, Helena Kaut-Howson, Terry Hands who came here after his tenure of the RSC, Tamara Harvey who was here until leaving to co-run the RSC, and now Kate Wasserberg alongside executive director Liam Evans-Ford.
TIME TO MODERNISE
Theatre buildings are hardworking, and they don’t always age well. Concrete buildings from the ‘70s also often don’t age well and, usually filled with the asbestos of that era, become challenging and expensive to fix. Theatr Clwyd was the intersection of those two worlds. As far back as 2010, reports were noting that parts of the building were at or beyond their end of life. That led, in 2017, to an ambitious plan from the theatre to re-invent, update and modernise the way it presented itself to its devoted public, and in every aspect of the way the building operated including the energy it consumed and where that energy came from.In 2019, the building became Grade II listed, which might have complicated the process, but all involved actually consider this a blessing as it ensured the building had to remain and continue to operate as a theatre. Then in 2022, after years of planning, the building closed down for that transformation. However, people still came to the top of the hill to be entertained in a series of temporary venues, particularly the Roundabout touring tent, and then, in an audacious bit of planning, back in the main theatre the Christmas before the full building reopened just for panto, before being handed back to the builders to finish off.The formal reopening was late last year. As you may well have heard, there have been setbacks since then, most particularly a flood just days after opening that wiped out the main theatre’s brand-new dimmer room. The crew, as old-school rep crews (in the best sense) do, just took that in their stride. Lighting manager Chris Skinner, who’s been at the building for years, rounded up the temporary cable and distro they’d collected putting on shows outside the building during the refurb and constructed a temporary dimming solution around it. The show must go on, etc.
And so, here we are, standing in the summer sun outside a renewed building humming gently with life.
ARCHITECTURE
Facing the building, there is a hint of familiarity from the photographs of another building we’ve covered here recently, the Court Theatre in New Zealand (see LSi June 2026). But perhaps that’s not a coincidence given that they’re both projects by theatre masterarchitects Haworth Tompkins. What’s wrong with a little ‘house style’, as long as it supports the building rather than dominating it? Perhaps also it’s about materials, the timber frame and glulam beams both buildings feature as the construction industry has come to accept their practicalities and eco-credentials.Haworth Tompkins has always said, rightly, that all its projects are team efforts, but it is worth mentioning here that named partner Steve Tompkins finally retired during the Clwyd build, leaving other members of the team to step out of his public shadow. Here, the project lead was Lucy Picardo, a long-standing member of the Haworth Tompkins team and now one of the company’s directors. She introduced the story: “When we started on the project about 10 years ago, the building was much as it was in 1976 – brick, a concrete frame, really recessive entrances, multiple ways in: visitors and audience via one route, staff using another, actors through another, and another for the workshops. Our aim was to consolidate that, bringing everyone through the same front door and making the entrance much more welcoming.”That started with completely reworking the front façade: “A new foyer extension with a fully clear-glazed timber frame replaces the recessed, tinted-glass entrance; everyone now comes through that door.”
Unseen, the building’s mechanical systems have been completely reworked, with new insulation in the walls and roof, new glazing, new acoustic linings, new ventilation systems that are a mix of passive and mechanical systems. Many of the building’s flat roofs are laden with solar panels; the theatre is very clear of the benefits of these, and longs for both more and for battery storage. Rainwater is also harvested from the roofs. The old gas heating is gone, replaced by twin reversible (heat/cool) air source heat pumps, appropriately named Dylan and Thomas, part of the new installation designed by Skelly & Couch.
The architects then worked hard on circulation. “There is really generous circulation that connects the main auditoria (which is called Theatr Moondance), the Theatr Weston studio, and Stiwdio Anne (the former TV studio).
There’s also a big, hundred-cover restaurant run by local celebrity chef Bryn Williams.
“The other extension was to the workshop: though they had a paint frame, lots of their making still happened off-site. So, we added a box on the back that enables them to make everything in the building and take it straight onto the stage.”
As at the National, there is now a public access gallery to allow visitors to see theatre makers at work, without disturbing them. They’ve also, after all these years, added rehearsal spaces, as Picardo explains: “We cleared out old cellular offices from the legacy technology centre, creating a space that matches the footprint of the Moondance stage, raised the roof to 5m and added skylights to bring daylight in . . .” – this last element an addition that can be found in a number of other parts of the building as well.
The architects were guided by a strong client team, led by executive director and CEO Liam Evans-Ford and Andrew Roberts, the COO who has been at the theatre for much of his working life. The process – from fundraising to planning to building, another project that happened under the challenges of COVID – has clearly been a massive learning curve for both of them, but one which they seem to have relished, with the support of the architects, project manager Plann and theatre consultant Charcoalblue.
Roberts, who hosted my visit, is one of those joyous, enthusiastically unstoppable figures I think you’d want on any building project, and he was very clear about key things the building needed: “We used to have one FOH lift, for example, and when it broke down it was a disaster. We’d planned for two, but then the value engineering started and one almost got cut. That was when I held my ground and said no, we’ve lived with this problem for years. Now is our chance to solve it.” So now there are two lifts FOH, five in total around the building, helping solve all of the access problems caused by level changes in a building that sits across a hill and was originally conceived in an entirely different era of access considerations.
While Roberts was the host, the tour guide was Paul Franklin of Charcoalblue.
It’s clear there’s been a close, friendly and happy working relationship between theatre, architects and consultants, Andrew Roberts recalling with amusement: “The Paul Franklin ‘look’ when a contractor would say something in a meeting and the experienced consultant would just raise a quizzical eyebrow to let us know to be a bit suspicious. We were learning as we went – I now understand that ‘practical completion’ doesn’t really mean what it says at all, for example! Paul’s experience of having been through this same process on so many other theatres was invaluable.”
PERFORMANCE SPACES
Previously known as the Anthony Hopkins Theatre, Moondance presents a single rake of wide, curved, continuous (no centre aisle) seating rows to a proscenium that is about 10.5m wide and 7m high.The auditorium in turn wraps around the seating, the curved side walls containing three lighting slots per side, one just in front of the proscenium, the other two further back and designed almost as if a section of the wall has been split open towards the audience.
Curiously, it is very much a twin to the Thorndike in Leatherhead from 1969. The design is attributed to RW Harvey and the department of architecture at Flintshire County Council, along with theatre consultants Carr & Angier, with no mention of Roderick Ham who designed Leatherhead, but it’s too close to just be coincidence; the biggest difference is that the walls are clad in rich brown tiles rather than the Thorndike’s exposed concrete.
At first glance, little has changed, but in fact beneath the surface much has. The seating, for example, has been adjusted with new steps to create air vents for a new ventilation plenum underneath.
More seats have been squeezed in – the capacity is now up to 595, including six permanent spots for wheelchair users, but there is the ability to more easily remove seats, including to create mid aisles or an orchestra pit, if required.
Overhead, the lighting bridges have been revised to meet current health and safety standards (there are kickboards now!) and generally improve access and ease of use, with new dimmer and data outlets and a new house lighting system using ETC/GDS fixtures set in customdesign mounts created by LSI Projects, who supplied the entire lighting and AV package, to adapt them to the existing, larger holes in the acoustic ceiling panels.
Set into the rear of the auditorium is a new control room, with wheelchair access, flanked on either side by boxes for use by theatre staff or audience members, as necessary. The front of the control room has a door that provides access down into a rear-auditorium mixing position. The only awkward bit of access that remains is to the rear auditorium lighting bar above the control room window. At the time of our visit, an old ETC Ion was in the mix position next to a Yamaha CL3 console, connected back to a new ETC Apex 5 24K console in the control room.
Around the side walls, the slightly odd part is that the rear lighting slot has been extended forwards with a black-box construction that makes it deeper and wider than the original slot. Lighting manager Chris Skinner describes this arrangement as first being created years ago to provide a useful followspot position, a function it continues to serve as required now, and also because this slot was really just a bit too narrow to be useful.
Further forward, a new horizontal slot has been created on each side, accessible safely from behind to replace what must have been quite a scary-to-get-to, temporary-that-became-permanent bar from years ago. Interestingly, the lighting facility panels all feature 15A sockets paired with Socapex outlets, because, as both Paul Franklin and Chris Skinner note, that’s the connector all of the theatre’s existing lighting stock carries, and it would have been expensive (and wasteful) to change them all over to something else.
But might this perhaps be the last ‘new’ theatre to be so-equipped? Feeding those outlets are 15 ETC ColorSource ThruPower racks (360 ways), fitted into a fraction of the space of the original Strand STM/Permus dimmer installation. This does mean no 5K dimmers. These racks were an unfortunate casualty of that opening-week flood, where water from a failed pipe joint effectively ran through the building from top to bottom trying to find a way out, and ultimately all were replaced.
ThruPower means the venue is future ready: there’s already some LED gear, principally Chauvet COLORado LED PARs and cyc battens, and the theatre is preparing to invest in a new generation of LED fixtures. For now, it retains a rather wonderful ‘classic’ tungsten rig, lights ranging from Source Fours to PARs to SLs to Cantatas to Shakespeares to Pacifics to even CCT Freedoms revealing themselves in corners reclaimed as storage spots!
The audio equipment is a similar mix of the ages; the Yamaha consoles connect to Dante networks, with a Mac Mini running QLab for playback and effects. Loudspeakers include Meyer Sound UPA-1Cs and USW sub-base units, plus Duran Audio Scope T-2115 and Flex U-12 powered speakers. Additional Shermann Audio loudspeakers and Aviom A360 personal monitors are shared across the venues. But Matthew Williams, Clwyd’s senior technician for sound and AV, has recently been adding to his stock, with a new EM Acoustics Reference Series system now in place and, he notes: “Sounding great”.
There’s then a stock of Sennheiser radio mics based around existing EM 500 G3 receivers, and a good stock of wired microphones. The building-wide paging/ show-relay system uses the Q-SYS networking system, also supplied by LSI Projects.
The stage itself is flat, with a depth of about 12m and a grid height of about 18m. The grid holds 53 manually operated counterweight ladder-beam flying bars each able to carry up to 400kg uniformly distributed, a reworking of the original system carried out by Centre Stage Engineering. A key change here was adding additional pick-up lines at the extreme ends of the flying bars; that involved a new structure in the grid to provide support for those points. There are also side bars for lighting and masking.
Having spent the summer in Dutch and Belgium theatres with the fully automated flying systems that those countries now mandate, it felt slightly odd to walk into a ‘new’ theatre with manual flying, but Paul Franklin argues strongly that this was the right choice for this venue in terms of crew familiarity, speed of show setup, and ongoing running/maintenance costs.
A rather wonderful touch is that the original Strand Electric floods lighting the fly rail are still in place, though re-wired to accommodate LEDs as their light source. Another is that on the opposite gallery the original wooden pin rail continues in use. As is customary on Charcoalblue projects, the grid supports a number of travelling beams to support chain hoists.
All of the support infrastructure has been dramatically improved, long cat ladders replaced by safe, modern access routes. Upstage right provides the access route through to the workshop. Currently located downstage left is the prompt desk, a new design created by Charcoalblue and LSI Projects that is electrically height adjustable and designed to be re-configurable to suit left- or right-handed stage managers. It incorporates a cuelight system based around the Interspace Industries TheatreCue system, a Green- Go MCX comms system – and even somewhere to charge your phone!
Again, Moondance feels like the best of old-school rep: a stage that is big enough to put on a decent show without becoming too expensive to fill. The only slightly sad part is that Andrew Roberts will admit that while Theatr Clwyd is still a producing theatre, most of the work it creates – with the glorious exception of panto – now happens in its smaller theatre, Moondance mainly hosting touring shows. That is the economic reality of 21st century British theatre.
THEATR WESTON
Notionally a black-box studio of a form vaguely related to the studios at the likes of the Sheffield Crucible – an adaptable room with a balcony running around it – Weston differs from those spaces because there ‘studio’ means ‘really quite small’, whereas here that’s not the case.The space feels generous, maybe even big, and very square, whereas many of those spaces are definitely rectangular.That square is 16m at stalls level; the grid goes over the balcony and control area to give a depth of 19m at grid level; and there’s 3.5m from floor level to the underside of the balcony.
The space within the balconies is reconfigurable – end-on on the day of our visit, but the raked seating is just built from Steeldeck with the original seats, recovered in an elegant deep-green fabric, attached, so anything should be possible.
The balcony front has removable lighting bars and even removable balcony front panels. The front of the balcony houses a control room. This used to run the width of the room but has been squished in to allow for additional seating on either side of it. There’s a new ETC Eos Apex 5 24K console in here too, but the show was actually being run from an original Ion console next to a Yamaha CL5 mixing desk.
Overhead access is from a series of catwalks, which run around the edge of the room then across it and front to back down the centre. The bottom of the catwalk is 6.1m above floor level, with rigging bars at 7m. These, too, are the originals but modernised and updated, though the temporary scaffolding in place is a reminder that the solutions crews adopt are often not the ones architects and consultants envisioned.
Lighting power distribution here is again from ColorSource ThruPower racks, eight this time to give 192 ways. Inside the room it is fascinating to see the vast amount of conduit around the side walls, almost to the point of becoming a complete internal cladding, required to house the much bulkier cables demanded today compared to in the ‘70s – ironic given that the move to LEDs should substantially reduce the load on those cables.
House lighting is already LED, using ETC ArcPro Micro fixtures. There is minimal flying – just some winches upstage, mainly intended for hanging masking.
Part of that might be down to budget. But there’s also a sense that the design team were told this was a much-loved space that just worked and should be messed with at their peril!
STIWDIO ANNE, DUCHESS OF WESTMINSTER
Now this is a fascinating space. It is officially a multi-purpose room for rehearsals, community events, workshops and training. It was the former TV studio within the technology training centre and then for HTV, and evidence of that – particularly the TV lighting pantograph grid and the angled window to the former TV control gallery – have been preserved.None of this is functional anymore – while the pantographs retain their circuit ID badges, their outlets aren’t connected, and the gallery space is now part of the building’s main open-plan admin offices; there is new technical provision nestled amongst the old overhead.As in the main rehearsal room, the roof here has been reworked to incorporate a skylight, and the room is lined with new wooden panelling, bringing it a lovely warmth. At one end a staircase runs up to a gallery platform, which could be used as a control position during a performance. In here and elsewhere around the building are spots where history has been updated and given a new life: old ‘Silence – Curtain Up’ and ‘Quiet – Rehearsal/Performance’ signs have been refitted with LED and integrated into the house and worklight Paradigm control system.
SINEMA
Interesting here is the dark rectangular line around the floor, which delineates the sunken dance floor this room used to house. That’s now gone in favour of level access throughout.It’s intended as an event space, so Charcoalblue and LSI have put in a minimal grid nestling amongst the exposed roof trusses. Able to be drawn across one side of the room is a wonderfully colourful curtain, one of a number of art commissions throughout the building overseen by Studio Three Sixty, who also collaborated with Haworth Tompkins on the interior design.
Already mentioned is the existing paint frame, refurbished, and the newly constructed workshop space, which also enjoys great daylight from expansive windows that fill half the height of one wall. In plan those sit at the back-left corner of the building, and the three performance spaces then run in a line in front of them, with the Moondance stage lining up next to the workshop and dock door.The spaces in between are filled with dressing rooms, a wardrobe area split over two floors connected by a goods lift and again enjoying daylight, an in-progress LX workshop, lots of rooms that were either planned as or have been taken over as storerooms, and what the plan rather quaintly describes as a ‘backstage tea point’.
All of these spaces are clean and functional rather than glamorous. There is a fuller company green room between the foyer spaces and main office, this enjoying the same views as the audience, but also a great look down one of the solar arrays – a reminder of the work the building is doing to generate its own power.
Still something of a work-in-progress is the landscaping and general reconstitution of the building’s surrounds, particularly to the side (where the Roundabout tent lived) and the rear (where some temporary buildings remain, particularly the lighting department’s treasure-trove shed). A loss apparently felt more by the locals than anticipated was the underground walkway from the car park – hidden in the hill in front of the theatre – to the foyer. It was damp and problematic and so ultimately removed, but perhaps will be missed more on a cold Welsh winter day than a glorious summer one!
AND ON INTO THE FUTURE
That, then, is the new Clwyd, a project everyone is delighted with even if it’s one that is still not entirely ‘snagged’, having suffered from several more floods since opening. Even the joyful Andrew Roberts resorts to just a wry smile here; he knows the public might not understand why bits of the brand-new foyer of this expensive project are having to be shut off for repair so soon after reopening. But it’s just another problem to be solved; a reminder that practical completion is not actual completion, if in fact a building is ever truly complete.For him, the delight of seeing this place transformed and given a new life is a joyful reward. Clwyd’s public seems to agree: turnover is up dramatically, increasing almost threefold compared to before the rebuild.More importantly, Lucy Picardo talks excitedly of the constant life within the building, far beyond the performances it houses – of the wellbeing room run in collaboration with the NHS, of the music lessons the organisation runs for all of the local schools, of the visual arts gallery the building always housed but which is now exposed rather than hidden away.
And she talks of the achievement of ‘just getting it done’: “Through Brexit, COVID, changes of government, inflation, asbestos – they had a lot to deal with. But the result, I think, is remarkable, and a remarkable testament to everyone involved and all who loved the old Theatr Clwyd – and who will love and enjoy the new, sustainable, accessible Theatr Clwyd.”