We turned a redundant Grade 1 listed Victorian boilerhouse on the campus of Royal Holloway University of London into a place to explore new ways of making theatre. We were phantom architects whose interventions are nearly invisible.


The boilerhouse is not a humble space and it is intending to say around for some time. One of its strongest characteristics as a found space, almost the base note, is a nostalgia for 19th Century ambition and pride. But beyond this there is a real frozen energy in the structure that somehow is so actual that it escapes the past. The brick and the steel work appear as natural siblings. It was built at a time when the animalistic qualities of a leaping iron structure were recognised: joints were not so fetishised as they are now and it was clearly the movement of the eye over the structure that interested the architect.

Yet the history and scars of the various uses clearly tell the passing of time and these we were to add to but not alter. We were to be phantom architects whose interventions are nearly invisible. The new ceiling and floor really have a very minimal impact. The original roofing battens created an almost textile-like canopy over the space; the same rhythm is used to support new insulation and to very similar effect. The new sprung floor hides under a wearing surface of black painted hardboard. New wiring, pipe work and conduit were made ordinary and therefore unnoticeable, and old pipe work and fittings were left in place. We painted one of the seventies double-portholed doors a different colour because the previous red note was too insistently symmetrical. However, this messing with the colour balance will itself in time be messed with.

The materiality of the walls, particularly when skylit during the day, demands a one-to-one scale interaction with the space. At the same time this banality of the surfaces challenges the audience to mak their own framings and grasp at the illusions embedded in the performers’ actions.