Alistair Fair's Modern Playhouses is the first comprehensive survey of theatre building in the post-war years. It charts the departure from the red velvet and gilded cherubs of Victorian and Edwardian theatres, into the optimistic post-war era of redesigned town centres and public subsidies for the arts. Fair's book will appeal to scholars of civic and urban history, architectural history and the history of theatre building and performance. It gives a detailed account of Britain in the age of the welfare state, with the rise of affluence, leisure and the arts.

Fair places these theatres, and their architecture, in the context of post-war urban planning, civic design and ideas of citizenship, and challenges the view of the 1970s as a decade of decline and the 1980s as dominated by Thatcherism alone. Fair's forensic archival research is drawn from a variety of sources, ranging through The Stage, Architectural Review, national newspapers, archives of individual architects, university archives and Arts Council documents. The book is beautifully illustrated with architectural plans and models which not only illustrate the text, but serve as a reminder of the modernity of these buildings and their stark and deliberate departure from the commercial theatres of the pre-1914 era. Many of these theatres and arts centres, famously, put on performances that could prioritize content and artistic integrity over making a profit.

The book deals with the period chronologically, from the founding of the Arts Council in 1945, out of CEMA (the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). Fair sets the scene for this boom in theatre building and describes the role of key figures such as MP Jennie Lee, as minister of state for the arts, and funding initiatives such as ‘Housing the Arts’. The politics and the logistics of funding made available to the arts are explained, including the 1948 Local Government Act, which allowed local authorities to subsidize the arts. Fair also highlights the inventive ways that regional theatres tried to raise money alongside, or in place of, the box office, the Arts Council and local authorities. For instance, Salisbury Playhouse even put an advert in The Times to see if someone would like a theatre named after them for £100,000. Sadly, this remained unanswered.

Fair describes the enhanced facilities of post-war theatres, meaning that going to the theatre was an experience and formed a key part in post-war ideas of ‘cultured citizenship’: theatres were intended as places in which the modern citizen became culturally aware and literate. Theatres in the post-war era served as venues for socializing and had cafes, restaurants, exhibition galleries and airy circulation space. The interiors of these spaces are also given attention in the book and help to highlight what a departure these spaces were from their older counterparts. Fair's descriptions of these interiors help to colourize the black and white photographs reproduced in the book. For instance, Nottingham Playhouse had peacock blue seats and a yellow stage curtain. The Crucible at Sheffield had ‘a galaxy of twinkling lights above the seating, which suggested the open-air theatres of classical antiquity’, and Coventry's Belgrade Theatre had Bernard Schottlander chandeliers and mosaic panels by Martin Froy depicting the ‘Four Seasons’.

Fair outlines the increasing professionalization, and importance of, the technical aspect of theatre building and design in the post-war years. One of the first in the UK to be described as a ‘theatre consultant’ was Richard Southern. Southern was a specialist in the history of stage equipment, had worked on the Barbican Arts Centre and also co-wrote Essentials of Stage Planning in 1949 with Norman Marshall and Stanley Bell. The rise of the theatre consultant and acknowledgement of the technical importance of theatre design and architecture also explains the innovations in stage design that were made possible. An example is the unbuilt New Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill, which Ballet Rambert and the Royal Shakespeare Company appointed Basil Spence to design in 1963, notable for its moving away from the proscenium arch stage and the galleried auditoria. Fair lists the other alternatives to the proscenium arch stage, the ‘thrust’ stage with audience sitting around three sides of the stage; ‘in the round’ or ‘arena’ staging in which the stage is surrounded by the audience; the ‘transverse’ stage, in which the audience sits on two sides of the stage, and the ‘open-end’ stage which features a single block of seating facing the stage. This adoption of different stages, moving away from the proscenium arch stage, is another way these theatres were self-consciously modern.

This book is timely and serves as a poignant reminder of the transformative role of the arts, civic planning and theatre architecture in the post-war years: now so relevant in a time of real struggle for theatres and the arts. Who will have the foresight in the twenty-first century to lead the arts out of COVID? Who will take up the example of MP Jennie Lee?