London theatres are dumping their loyalty to the traditional Victorian playhouse and going in for radical refurbishments. Change or die, writes critic Michael Coveney. But will the feverish rebuilding leave one of our national companies out in the cold?

All over London, theatres are upping sticks and laying down new ground plans. The Young Vic is going "walkabout" for two years while its Waterloo premises are re-developed. The Whitehall, where Brian Rix dropped his trousers in the 1950s, has pulled up its socks and reconfigured the auditorium into two new spaces called the Trafalgar Studios. Cameron Mackintosh is creating a new 500-seater venue, the Sondheim, nestling above the Queen's and Gielgud theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. Uncomfortable bars and lavatories are to be upgraded; booking fees are to be reduced. Mackintosh also promises interconnecting public areas between the Wyndhams and the Albery on St Martin's Lane.

Some of this work, as at the Young Vic, is part of the necessary process of renewal. But most of it is a response to the changing expectations of a paying audience and a feeling that, unless the theatre finally escapes its Victorian legacy of elitism, discomfort and cultural predictability, it will not survive the next decade, let alone the next century.

The public appetite for the sort of intimacy and intensification that audiences enjoy at the Almeida in Islington or the Donmar in Covent Garden is reducing the collective will to brave the impersonal front-of-house insolence and sheer rip-off shabbiness of most West End venues.

That said, the appeal of an architectural masterpiece such as W G R Sprague's three-tier Edwardian Albery, with its clear sight lines, Louis XVI-style white and gold decorations and exquisite atmosphere - the actress Peggy Ashcroft once told me that theatres either have atmosphere or they don't; you can't design it - should ensure some future for the best West End theatres, however modified.

In fact, the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has been homeless in London since its impetuous exit from the Barbican, is occupying the Albery from November with its current Stratford season of tragedies, culminating with Vanessa Redgrave as Hecuba next April. Having fouled up its London operation so badly, the RSC will not announce any permanent plans in the capital until it has decided on how to redesign its main Stratford house, a project that has already cost the taxpayer an indecent amount of money in wasted feasibility studies for its demolition.

The RSC debacle has been a catalogue of disastrous decision-making. The Barbican was built to RSC specifications, but the company liked being there less than its audiences did. Productions created for Stratford's Swan Theatre have no obvious home in London because of the Elizabethan cockpit design, and the gloriously informal Other Place has been ruined by its brickish rebuild, virtually abandoned along with the company's new writing policy.

Michael Boyd, the RSC's artistic director who inherited the mess from Adrian Noble, is at least putting a brave face on the predicament. He claims that the RSC's heart lies in Stratford but that the fruit of its work needs to be "tested" in London. At a recent press conference, Boyd commented on the creative tension between a market town in the country and the bustling urban metropolis - a tension that was profound, he noted, in Shakespeare's own life and work. But the RSC was founded and funded to be a presence in both locations, and the taxpayer is badly short-changed by the current situation.

One thing the RSC was not funded to do is solve the West End's problems, or even participate in them, and Boyd's idea that the RSC's presence in the Albery will somehow add lustre and respect to what he obviously views as a wasteland of rubbish musicals is both misguided and patronising.

Another aspect of the London homelessness is the extra cost of offices and theatre rents that the RSC was excused in its arrangement with the Barbican. Still, if Boyd's new Stratford design (plans are to be announced in the autumn) is matched by a London equivalent - in the anodyne New London, in the horrid Piccadilly? - he can start to redefine his company.

All of this proves the ephemeral, volatile nature of theatre, which will always adapt to changing pressures and energies. The Royal Court, for instance, was rejuvenated by its period of exile in the reconfigured Ambassadors Theatre (divided into two auditoria, much like the Whitehall is now). And the reclamation of "found spaces" all over Europe has been the hallmark of the most innovative and exciting new theatre, from Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord in Paris to the Flower Market in Barcelona and the Tramway in Glasgow.

This autumn, London will host a clutch of similarly promising projects: Simon McBurney's Complicite company hopes to revitalise the shamefully neglected Alexandra Palace Theatre; the performance artist Marisa Carnesky will produce a surreal fairground Ghost Train event at the Old Truman Brewery in Spitalfields; and the performance collective Shunt - critically acclaimed and given a further nod of approval by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre's all-conquering artistic direc- tor - will animate a labyrinth of railway arches under London Bridge Station.

In a show called Tropicana, which opens on 9 September, Shunt will take the audience on a journey through these vaults - "if we get it all dug in time", says the director, David Rosenberg. He and his colleagues in the Shunt collective (all in their thirties) see the experience of the space as being bigger than the show itself, although he aims at something with sensory appeal through aerial performance, comedy, rock music, videos and fire artists. Rosenberg reckons that the fiddling with existing theatres, such as the Whitehall, is a "pretty conservative approach" that will do nothing to make theatre attractive to a younger audience. "The space not having the title of a theatre, or a studio, is an important thing for us."

Across town in suburban, salubrious Kingston-upon-Thames, Peter Hall is beating the drum for his new Rose of Kingston, which opens in December and is based on the ground plan of the original Rose where many of Shakespeare's early plays were presented.

The Rose is the first purpose-built theatre in London since the National in 1976 and will be offering a repertory season supervised by Hall in conjunction with Kingston University. This sounds like an interesting rather than inspirational project, but as Brecht always said, the proof of the pudding . . . and you wonder who will be bothering with the West End if the new energy is all to do with new theatre environments.

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