Isit in the Espresso Bar of the National Theatre, exchanging Denys Lasdun stories with Steve Tompkins. Steve is a director of Haworth Tompkins, architect of the NT Future redevelopment of Lasdun's masterwork, its first phase due to finish next year. Out of the corner of my eye I see the entrance to The Shed, a temporary theatre docked against the National and opened in April as part of this enterprise. The whole complex is steeped in legend. It's said Lasdun drank a bottle of whiskey every day while working on the National and that the project architect was taken off site in a straightjacket. 'Denys was one of them,' Lasdun's partner John Hurley once said, likening him to former National director Lawrence Olivier. 'He was larger than life.' Lasdun's appointment was announced on the day JFK was assassinated and the National opened in the year the Sex Pistols recorded Anarchy in the UK. From '60s positivism to chaos in 13 years.
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