At any one time there may be several dramas being played out on the stages of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), in London's old university quarter. But few will be quite so satisfying as the rebuilding of Rada itself, a project that has taken 16 years and demanded infinite patience of its architect, Bryan Avery.
Act one of this behind-the-scenes drama opened in 1984, when Rada considered a move to the much vaunted King's Cross redevelopment area. Its old home, at 62-64 Gower Street, was impossibly cramped and outdated, and King's Cross promised generous space around a new urban park. But the property market crashed soon after and King's Cross sank back into the urban twilight.
Act two was a proposed move to a redundant power station in Hoxton. Given how fashionable this part of London has become recently, it could have been a shrewd move. But where was the money to come from? Rada has never been flush with cash. The very survival of this famous and deeply democratic school has been something of a miracle.
"By the beginning of the 1990s," says Lord Attenborough, Rada's chairman of the past 30 years, "we were almost insolvent and the building was getting a bit wobbly. We were bombed out in May '41. I was a Rada student on firewatch duty at the time. The next day those of us who hadn't yet been called up to fight came in and swept up.
"There was this utterly magical moment when this extraordinary figure in plus-fours and a long white beard came down the stairs, looked at us, and said in a soft Irish lilt, 'We're reopening.' That was George Bernard Shaw, still our most important patron through the financial legacy he left us." Come Heinkel, Dornier or V1, Rada's show went on.
Act three marked the arrival of Dame Fortune in the guise of, first, National Lottery money and, second, the purchase of nearby buildings at Chenis Street. Even without moving, there would be enough space to shape an academy fit for the 21st century. That there are new demands is not in question.
Today's graduates are as likely to be doing voiceovers for commercials or playing character parts in TV dramas as treading the boards reciting Shakespeare. Here, in the new-look academy opened by the Queen last week, students learn every aspect of their craft, from selling tickets and acting as usherettes to putting on the greasepaint and stepping into the limelight.
The rebuilt site is a model of dramatic constraint. It has fronts on two streets - Malet and Gower - and yet, although essentially a long and narrow construction, it is awash with daylight and never once feels claustrophobic. It is almost hard to fathom just how Avery has squeezed so much accommodation into so tight a site.
There are three theatres (admittedly two of them very small), a public café, an abundance of classrooms, rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms. There are big, factory-like workshops for making stage scenery, a TV and radio studio, places for students to perch when learning lines. The academy is as densely packaged as the human body it frames. Yet everywhere there are slits, slants and chutes of light, cut-outs through stairwells together with a lightwell in the heart of the building, that make this compact package of brick, concrete, steel, timber and glass a relaxed and easy place to be.
"I love the way Bryan has kept a sense of our history throughout the building," says Attenborough, pointing out the academy's two bronzes of Shaw by Epstein and Rodin. "It's nearly all new, but it feels like a familiar friend already."
You see the mix of past and present at its best in the new Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre (designed by Avery with Iain Mackintosh's Theatre Projects Consultants), which replaces the bigger, but less workable Vanbrugh Theatre built here in 1954.
This superb, 200-seat, multi-purpose space for teaching, rehearsals and social events as well as performances may well be ultra-modern, yet its provenance is not too hard to recognise: in proportion, dimension and spirit, this is the ideal theatre that Inigo Jones designed for Sir William Davenport in 1683. In essence, its form is two spheres - stage and auditorium - that intersect at the proscenium. The result is a small theatre that still feels grand and ennobling for both actors and audience.
It is also an architectural expression of Rada's core values: 34 lucky students among the thousands auditioned between November and June each year come here to learn how to become professional actors, all of them able to perform the classics whether they end up as stand-up comics or screen villains in years to come. Here, tradition and modernity are reflected in both the course and its architecture.
The fact that Avery's building is so very open in feel and spirit is another clue to the way Rada works. It is an astonishingly open institution and, as a result, a difficult one to fund day-to-day. "We take students from any background aged up to 30 in our acting and stage management courses," says Nick Barter, Rada's director.
"Once we've offered them a place, we fund them. Other independent colleges accept high numbers of students from overseas whose families are able to pay the fees, which are inevitably high in central London. This is unfortunate because it relates talent to wealth. We just get on the phone - Dickie Attenborough, the students themselves, all of us - and find the money somehow or other. We have one student who has 30 individual sponsors."
This shaky financial set-up, although rather ridiculous given the extent to which Rada contributes to the successes of cinema, showbiz and media, does keep this premier dramatic academy on the edge of its seat. It makes for a sharp, responsive, highly intelligent institution. Now, with £22.5m from the Arts Council Lottery Fund and £8m from private and other donations underpinning the new building, at least its physical setting is certain.
The money has also bought a new 17,000-volume library, a student refectory and other classrooms in recently purchased outbuildings along the road. Most of all, it has kept this institution where it belongs - on the site where it was born almost a century ago.
