When Peter Brook, the most revered theatre director in the world, brings his acclaimed new production of Hamlet from Paris to London next month, it will be playing at the Young Vic.

As all its admiring patrons know, this is a disused butcher's shop (you can see the old tiling in the ticket hall), on a grimy Southwark street, with an attached breeze-block arena.

I live in hope that, as we sidle deeper into the 21st century, the penny will finally have dropped: theatre isn't about bricks and mortar - or, these, days, concrete and glass. It's about what happens on that stage inside. It's about imagination, about content and about ideas.

No one goes to the Young Vic for a comfortably upholstered night out. You go because of what's on there, and how well it's done. Like the Almeida theatre, in its converted Salvation Army citadel in Islington, the Young Vic is a key component in that ring of vigorous small enterprises that encircle the traditional West End like a bright halo.

Their smallness is a bonus. You feel as if you're in on something. You, the audience, are united against the dull outside world where theatre means, on my current count, a total of seven West-End shows which are just stage reworkings of film scripts.

The heresy that a new building was more important than a new idea began about a generation ago. The glamorous, if sometimes tacky, Edwardian music halls were pulled down. Today, those that survived, such as the Hackney Empire or the Coliseum - both designed by that master architect of entertainment, Frank Matcham - are much more cherished than, say, Sir Denys Lasdun's National Theatre.

Lottery money made this obsession with rebuilding even worse. The Royal Court recently closed its doors for three years in order to carry out reconstruction work, costing about £26 million, most of it coming from the Lottery. With enormous labour, a vast new theatre restaurant was dug out under Sloane Square, as if Chelsea lacked eating places. It's hard enough to run a theatre, without also having to balance the books of a restaurant. (Compare this with Wembley, where the astronomically costly plan, now abandoned, focused on fancy extras, not on the needs of a new stadium.)

The unimportance of bricks and mortar came home to me most forcibly earlier this month. I was lucky enough to be at the first night of the English National Opera's staged production of Verdi's stupendous Requiem, the final, amazing item in the Coliseum's Italian Season.

Not so long ago, in dire constructional rivalry with Covent Garden, ENO planned to quit the Coliseum for some newly-built theatre at Paddington or King's Cross. Fortunately, the choice never had to be made. The scheme was dropped in favour of a much more modest rehab job, which begins in the new year. Hardly any performance nights will be lost.

Covent Garden's protracted love affair with builders and architects won it no bonus points artistically. It's in the doldrums. But with its admirable Italian Season, the Coliseum showed what can be done with the power of ideas.

It was unbelievably courageous to put on seven new productions within a three-month season. Corners were cut on set design - not always with success. Risks were taken with productions - which didn't always pay off. But that doesn't matter. Most of the time, in the five productions I saw, you felt that you were taking part in a great musical adventure. The low-ish points could be set against vertiginous highs.

You saw Leoncavallo's La Bohème - the one that Puccini knocked out of the repertoire - and you found that the composer of Pagliacci brought out the sourer side of a bohemia which Puccini sprinkled with saccharine. You saw Verdi's early opera, Nabucco, whose "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" is a Classic FM standard, but which is seldom staged.

And then, to cap all, Phyllida Lloyd's knockout production of the Requiem. She made it the most moving choral work I'd heard since I once saw Stravinsky conduct his own Oedipus Rex at the Festival Hall. Some critics liked this Requiem. Some, like the Evening Stan-dard's Tom Sutcliffe, hated it. The audience applauded it to the rafters.

I'D say the Coliseum is back to its 1980s preeminence. No more attractive sentence could be written than "Tonight I'm going to the Coliseum." But I worry about the prize-laden Almeida, closing for about 14 months from February while it does its own rehab. It will perform, instead, in an old bus garage. Yet, by putting on Shakespeare, starring Ralph Fiennes, in Hitchcock's bare former film studios in Shoreditch, the Almeida last summer confirmed that all you need is a space and an idea. The current miraculous production of The Tempest, I thought, underlines this. Nostalgic for shabbiness, some ticket holders may be reluctant to move back from that garage to a smartenedup Almeida.

To fight off its prowling competitors, what theatre needs is adventurousness. Lottery funds should refuse any more theatre pleas for building works, after those already under negotiation, however plangent the appeal.

Peter Brook himself performs, mostly, in an old theatre on the north side of Paris. He told Richard Eyre on BBC2 this month that he loves its dank walls and faded chocolate-box glory because "in this theatre you feel life has gone through." Nothing is pasteurised.

"I have had many abortive discussions with architects building new theatres," Brook once wrote, "trying vainly to find words with which to convey my conviction that it is not a question of good buildings and bad: a beautiful place may never bring about explosion of life, while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting place; this is the mystery of the theatre."

Hence Verdi's Requiem on Frank Matcham's old vaudeville stage in St Martin's Lane, or Hamlet at the Young Vic. They're public paeans to a sense of adventure. Without this, theatre would be dead.

Courtesy of the Daily Telegraph.

© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 27 December 2000