Helvetica and theatre

Sitting at the computer writing blog stuff is a fine occupation when you’re not doing a lot of sitting at the computer otherwise, writing or preparing for writing (e.g. reading and analysing and making notes). But that’s what I have been doing because of the history research I'm involved in -- hence my recent poor showing here.

However.

I started a posting a few weeks ago saying that I'd been to the National Theatre – to see not a play (God, no) but an exhibition of James Ravilious’s photographs. Ravilious deserves a serious entry in himself but the point I wanted to make was about the National Theatre, that I've always felt a lack of affection for it and that part of the reason is its use of Helvetica as the house typeface. That link is to something I wrote about Helvetica before (right, when I was properly fulfilling my responsibilities as a blogger).


In that context I find Helvetica cold and corporate, inimical to thoughts of theatre’s excess. On the posters round the theatre and in tube stations and in the pages of the season’s programme booklet, all the different plays are announced in the same font of the same size, though differing in colour, alignment and orientation. The scheme evokes some bureaucrat’s masterplan: category Programme, subcategory Plays, item Individual Play. It’s not appropriate and smacks of executives and NHS hospital signs (they aren’t Helvetica but evoke the same spirit).

It’s a handsome typeface, of course, no doubt about it and it looks good against brutalist architecture.

But it doesn’t go with thoughts of the subtle variation of plays with their delicacies and crudenesses and wildnesses, where the spirit of buttoned-up self-satisfied Helveticaness is just one pole amongst the many that are set in dynamic tension. (That’s if you can have more than two poles.)

I suppose when Helvetica was first devised and issued it was exhilarating and Bauhausy. But by now it’s been tainted, like so many good modern things, through its Cold War appropriation by American capitalism. I think.

The Europeans in Bradford c.1958

Hah! Helvetica again I see, on the right… 1969, a Methuen Modern Play (great series). I'm getting more and more allergic to that typeface. I've just noticed after 40 years (or however many) that it’s what the National Theatre uses and must be part of the reason I feel so little love for that institution. But more of that another time – the National Theatre has nothing to do with my experience of those plays.

I never saw The Fire Raisers but have had the book around since I bought it for, apparently, ‘7s. 6d. (37½ p)’ and have just re-read it in a brief orgy of returns to plays that I saw and read years ago and still have copies of. From Penguin Plays, Three European Plays, 1958 (2/6) I've read Ring Round the Moon by Jean Anouilh and The Queen and the Rebels by Ugo Betti. I skipped Sartre’s In Camera (Huis Clos) because I've kept going back to him in the intervening years. Then onto Max Frisch, The Fire Raisers.

The Anouilh and the Betti I saw (certainly the former) at the Bradford Civic Playhouse when I was still at school; probably the Sartre as well and some Giroudoux. ‘Playhouse’, note, not ‘Theatre’ which I've been calling it in earlier postings: I just thought of looking to see if they have a website. Not only do they and it gives me the right name but it has lists of productions from 1947; only for certain years, though, unfortunately, and not the ones I’d like to look at. (I also gather the theatre has been through vicissitudes over the years, is currently ‘The Priestley’ and is in administration pending relaunch as the Bradford Playhouse. Good luck to them.)

The productions were amateur and I suppose crude but had a powerful effect on me as a teenager who had no other experience of theatre. The way the lighting created dawn through the French windows over some desultory party-goers too exhausted to get themselves to bed or through the bars of a prison cell in some desperate central European police state was magical. And the plays, even when lightweight (Anouilh) were elegant, intelligent and interesting. They made the Continent seem so much more exciting than the tatty and tacky Britain of the 50s – a point confirmed by the stuff I've been reading about that period: Colin MacInnes [check MacInnes label in the right hand margin] and now Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade (free from Amazon, virtually, apart from £3 postage – and thrown out by Leeds University, I note. Right.)

About The Fire Raisers, first produced in Zurich in 1958 and at the Royal Court, London, in 1961:

The fire raisers are a secret group who go around the town starting fires. A couple of them move in on a bourgeois family and made no secret of the fact that that’s what they are but the businessman father (Biedermann) finds it more comfortable to convince himself they’re joking as they fill his loft with drums of petrol and ask him for matches. It’s stylish and funny as well as sinister. I especially like the Greek chorus of firemen:

CHORUS
Ready are we,
Carefully coiled are the hoses,
In accordance with the regulations,
Polished and carefully greased and of brass
Is each windlass.
Everyone knows what his task is.

CHORUS LEADER
An ill wind is blowing –

CHORUS
Everyone knows what his task is,
Polished and carefully tested,
To make sure that we have full pressure,
And likewise of brass is our pump.

CHORUS LEADER
And the hydrants?

CHORUS
Ready are we….

And here’s a sample couple of pages – wonderful stuff, and quite unlike anything being done in the Britain of the ineffectual Angry Young Men and the prosaic Kitchen Sink (click to enlarge):

Can a typeface nag?

Can a typeface nag? Paula Scher, herself a typographic designer, thinks so. The Helvetica typeface is for her part of “a conspiracy of my mother’s to remind me to keep my room clean”; Helvetica is a prim governess from whom typeface designers have needed to liberate themselves, too uptight, too corporate, too clean and complacent.

The pics I've taken are Helvetica – I think. It comes in different versions, of course. One clue is supposed to be the horizontal terminals on c, e and s.


The typeface was designed in Switzerland (hence Helvetica) in 1957. It was a manifestation of the need to reconstruct after the war, part of the emergence of a modernist international Swiss style.

In Holland, the designer Wim Crouwel used Helvetica in designs for stamps, the telephone book and school textbooks. “It was like our mother tongue,” a Dutch commentator remarked.

Image from Wikipedia.

Arial is Microsoft’s Helvetica.

The information here comes from the film Helvetica by Gary Hustwit (2007).


Lovely images, interesting history, but it’s always fascinating as well to hear the way specialist professionals talk about things we’d find very hard to articulate – e.g. the feel of different typefaces, what a typeface means.

A couple of designers illustrate how they talk about typefaces: essentially they use metaphor. They’re liable to say things like:

“No, this has that 1975 rocket early NASA feeling. It’s need to have the orange plastic Olivetti typewriter Roman holiday espresso feeling.” (Wonderful how English can use those piled-up nouns as pre-modifiers. It’s a feature that seems totally absent from respectable Victorian prose, like Trollope.)

“It has that belt and suspenders look. It needs to be elegant hand-lasted shoe.”

According to many of the speakers, Helvetica is classic, the last word in a particular line of development. Neutral, democratic, reassuring, solid – those are the sort of words that are used of it.

Which is why many, like Paula Scher, have revolted against it; hence the Grunge typography of many ‘80s record covers and magazines.

Wim Crouwel says,
“It was neutral and neutral was a word that we loved. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning was in the content of the text.”

Someone else:
"Helvetica all about the negative spaces. The space between the characters holds the letter. You can’t imagine anything moving. It’s so firm. It’s a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space.”

Hmm. Would I have said that?

Michael Bierut, Graphic Designer, holds up a 1950s magazine and describes how typography in that period showed every kind of bad habit:

“You’ve got zany hand lettering everywhere, squashed typography to signify elegance, exclamation points exclamation points exclamation points, cursive wedding invitation typography down here…. This was everywhere in the 50s.”

And on the advent of Helvetica:

"I imagine there was a time when it just felt so good to take stuff that was old, dusty and homemade and crappy-looking and replace it with Helvetica. It just must have felt like you were scraping the crud off filthy old things and restoring them to shining beauty. And in fact corporate identity in the 60s, that’s what it sort of consisted of. You know, clients would come in and they’d have like piles of goofy old brochures from the 50s that had like shapes on them, like goofy bad photographs, they had some letterhead with Amalgamated Widget on the top and some, maybe a script typeface above Amalgamated Widget , it would have like an engraving showing their headquarters, you know, Peduka, Iowa, with smokestacks belching smoke you know.

And then you get a corporate identity consultant c.1965, 1966 and they would take that and lay it here and say ‘Here’s your current stationery and all it implies, and this is what we’re proposing.’ Next to that, next to the belching smokestack and the nuptual [sic] script and the ivory paper they’d have a crisp bright white piece of paper and instead of Amalgamated Widget founded 1867 it just would say, Widgco, in Helvetica Medium.

Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was, that must have seemed like you’d crawled through a desert, your mouth just caked with filthy dust, and someone’d offer you a clear refreshing still icy glass of water to clear away all this horrible kind of like burden of history. It must have been fantastic, and you know it must have been fantastic because it was done over and over and over again.”

With Grunge anything went – no rules, no constraints, and in the end nowhere else to go. According to the film, if there’s to be a new classic typeface to replace Helvetica, it hasn’t appeared yet.