Facebook X Email Print Save Story The brutalist Royal National Theatre building, which sits aggressively on the south side of the River Thames, in London, is a “love it or loudly despise it” kind of place—all concrete edges and unwelcoming angles. King Charles III once morosely described it as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London.” For the playwright and screenwriter James Graham, however, it holds a certain appeal.
“I think the geometry of it is fucking sexy,” he told me recently. We were seated on a mezzanine floor in the dining room of the theatre’s upscale restaurant, Lasdun, named for the building’s architect, Denys Lasdun. Looking down through a large window, we could take in the buzzing lobby and the pre-theatre-drinks crowd.
The vibe surrounding us was moody-industrial: white tablecloths and black leather seats, with spotlit concrete walls and dark flooring. The ceiling, also concrete, was coffered, like a particularly sturdy beehive. Graham likes an Old-Fashioned at Lasdun’s bar when his plays are in tech in the theatres below, and they often are.
(Once you know his name, it’s seemingly everywhere.) The restaurant was a fitting location for a playwright known for history plays that interrogate, in unsparing detail, the U.K.
’s most treasured national institutions. In “This House,” his breakout work, from 2012, he explored the inner workings of Parliament and the ascent of Margaret Thatcher. “Ink,” wh.