Before the curtain rises, Morocco’s new Royal Theater of Rabat by the architect Zaha Hadid suspends disbelief. On the banks of the Bou Regreg River, the design emerges like a wave, swelling and cresting over recital halls before dropping down to an entrance that opens into lobbies that evoke canyons. Crisscrossing, ribbonlike stairways climb four-story cliffs. Opera boxes overlook an auditorium that resembles a geode. The scenography is not just onstage.
At the height of her career before her death in 2016, the Iraqi-British architect designed the Royal Theater, which includes indoor and outdoor stages, as the climax structure in a body of work whose technological sophistication allowed her to make a high-tech building look like an ocean sculpted by Brancusi.
In the last decade of her practice, she sought what she called “ultimate movement and fluidity.” Digital technology was liberating Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and her close colleague at the firm, Patrik Schumacher, from the geometry book and the cold grasp of buildings that look like steel-and-glass machines.
In 2010, King Mohammed VI of Morocco personally invited Hadid at her London-based firm to design the theater in the capital. Disappointed that her bold competition concept for a theater in Casablanca had lost to the French architect Christian de Portzamparc, the king wanted Hadid to build her original design in Rabat. Hadid convinced him to start fresh with a building tailored to the new site, a river valley between the capital and its twin city, Salé.
FOR HADID, THE INVITATION rang a very loud and unpleasant bell. Twenty years before in Wales, she did not receive the same royal welcome. In what would have been a career-making project, the 45-year-old architect won, then lost, and then in another round won and lost again, a competition for the Cardiff Opera House. The front-page drama raised questions about style and prejudice. The crystalline, angular building was criticized for being fashionably Deconstructivist. The design may have been the canary in the coal mine foretelling Brexit: A country keen on heritage was rejecting an Iraqi-born female immigrant bringing a cosmopolitan design to a provincial city. Hadid took the rejection personally, citing “resistance and prejudice.” Her phone stopped ringing. She considered leaving the country.
“The Cardiff Bay story was one of the great traumas of her career, and one could see this semi-posthumous building in Rabat as a kind of triumphal justification,” said Deyan Sudjic, former director of London’s Design Museum. In Rabat, Zaha could look back with schadenfreude.
On April 22, Lalla Khadija, the king ’s daughter, and Lalla Meryem and Lalla Hasna, his sisters, inaugurated the building in the royal box, where they were joined by France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron. A program of Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Arab-Andalusian songs and Driss El Maloumi, an oud master performing his own compositions, put the hall through its acoustic paces, signaling the theater’s policy of showcasing Morocco’s musical traditions along with an international repertoire.
MOROCCO IS FAMOUS for its crafted Moorish architecture — intricate plaster work, dazzling ceramics, hypnotic geometric decoration. But the country that the inaugural program calls “a resolutely forward-looking Morocco” is now wired for the 21st century. Advanced three-dimensional design and construction software implemented by sophisticated contractors made the devilishly difficult curves of the theater feasible.
The software, some originating in movie animation, has allowed architects to conceive buildings with the complexity of clouds, mountains and landscapes. Software also enabled the architects to devise a new kind of “brick” — panels of glass fiber-reinforced concrete that can be molded like the body of a boat. (It greatly corrected the flat stone tiles roofing Hadid’s 2010 opera house in Guangzhou, China, which did not conform to the curvature of the roof shells. Some tiles detached.)
The Bou Regreg River, flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, is tidal. It reverses flow. A thin wave at the southeast end of the Royal Theater rises from what had been marshland and widens, swells and then splits. The dominant wave peaks over the 1,800-seat auditorium and its fly tower before subsiding toward the main entrance, where it encounters another swell. The audience enters the building through this turbulence. “Zaha’s early sketches show the movement of the water around the building affecting its shape,” said Nils Fischer, project director on the theater.
“My jaw dropped,” said Anna Glass, executive director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, when she saw it at the opening. “It takes your breath away, like the heart-stopping feeling you get on a roller coaster for the first time. Then curiosity draws you in.”
The job of concert halls and opera houses is to wrap music in a soundproof container. Hadid did not just build a container but an architectural performance. Visitors enter under a breaking wave, like surfers shooting a tunnel. A river promenade runs through the interior, from the entrance through design rapids in tall canyons, then down to a 7,000-seat open-air auditorium adjacent to the river.
Everything curves or leans. Only the right angle of an occasional stainless-steel espresso machine perched on streamlined bars breaks the spell of flowing topographies. The body is immersed in sensations often provoked by nature.
“I kicked the tires on the building to see if it works,” said Alex Poots, artistic director of the Shed in New York, who also attended the opening. “Generous wings, depth behind the stage, storage for equipment, a beautiful green room, completely wonderful acoustics.”
ALMOST AS WIDE as it is deep, the horseshoe-shaped hall is designed for intimacy. “When you’re onstage, that horseshoe seating gives you the feeling of being enveloped by the audience — hugged,” said Glass, whose troupe will be performing in the theater’s first full season this fall. “I suspect our dancers are going be showing off because they’ll want to give back what they feel they’re receiving.”
Hadid, with Schumacher and Fischer, originally walked the site in 2010, and building began in 2014. Construction was completed in 2021, five years after her death. Though posthumous, “It’s certainly an authentic Zaha building and a reminder of how strong an architect she really was,” Sudjic said. The coronavirus pandemic, however, postponed an opening that was then further delayed by supply chain shortages on theatrical equipment, and delayed again by the disastrous 2023 earthquake in southern Morocco. Mothballed until its opening this spring, the Royal Theater has been a subject of great curiosity as citizens and tourists milled around the landmark at a roped distance.
The 290,000 square foot, $170 million building was sited diplomatically. “The theater acts as a connector of the two sides of the valley whose cities historically have been quite disconnected,” Fischer said. The valley itself lies at the foot of the acropolis where the mausoleum of Mohammed VI’s grandfather and father, Mohammed V and Hassan II, presides. (The king required that the theater’s height not exceed that of the acropolis’s plinth.)
Under the vision of Mohammed VI, “the Royal Theater of Rabat reflects Morocco’s broader commitment to culture and the creative industries as drivers of development, while strengthening cultural exchange with Africa and the world,” its artistic director and deputy general manager, Brahim El Mazned, said. It is positioning itself as an international platform for Moroccan, Arabic and African music, dance and theater — and, yes, Western pop (it will host “This is Michael,” a live tribute show to Michael Jackson, on Oct. 29). As part of the wider initiative, a major Pan-African cultural center, the Museum of the Continent, is now under construction in central Rabat.
The Royal Theater joins a select group of spectacle museums like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and opera houses in Sydney, Australia, and Oslo, Norway, that position these cities as destinations on the culture map. In terms of sheer critical mass, according to its director, it is one of the largest performing arts complexes in Africa and the Middle East.
“This will be the first time the Dance Company of Harlem has been back to the continent since the ’90s, when we performed in South Africa at the request of Nelson Mandela,’’ Glass said. “We all understand the significance of this theater, both to Morocco and the continent.”
For Hadid — who studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived in the Iraqi diaspora her entire adult life, often vacationing in Morocco — the project was a cultural homecoming, she said in a previous conversation. Despite early fame starting in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until after the millennium, with a Pritzker under her belt and successful projects in China, that Arab countries offered major commissions. The Arab Spring, however, stopped many, after which new commissions came. More than a half dozen posthumous buildings have been, or are now being built, under the leadership of Schumacher, across North Africa and the Middle East.
For many centuries, architects have built glory into cathedrals and mosques. “I think people have always aspired to invent such spaces,” Hadid once said in an interview. “It is uplifting to go into a great space, a heavenly space.”
As a performance venue, the Royal Theater is secular, but it has the capacity to transport the audience to an imaginary space and time. Hadid has taken wonder beyond the curtain and staged it throughout the building.
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