The first stirring act of the making of the Hoghton Tower Shakespeare Centre is drawing to a close. Nick Helm, architect in charge of the project - a kind of Shakesperean Glyndebourne of the North - is about to submit the scheme to local planners. If it gets the go-ahead, a new theatre and education wing will be built in the recusant Catholic shadow of the great Lancashire house situated between Preston and Blackburn, the seat of the De Hoghtons for 1,000 years and Shakespeare's hideaway in the early 1580s.
Helm's quietly dramatic £20m building would be sited in the quarry - dug to provide stone for the construction of Hoghton Tower - which plunges 80ft or so from the level of the house to dense deciduous woodland below. Even at this early stage the designs are promising. They reveal a theatre with anything between 450 and 800 seats and an education block that will appear to be dug deep into the rockface, invisible from the avenue leading up to the house.
The idea is that theatregoers and doctoral students will discover the centre by entering a grand 16th-century stone barn standing between house and quarry face. This will lead down to a foyer filled with views of the woods pushing against the vertiginous face of the quarry. From the foyer, visitors can move between theatre, gallery, bars and the education wing. In effect, the centre will be a well-kept secret, hidden in a dramatic landscape. Helm calls the design "a magical adventure through landscape and performance".
This secretive design is appropriate, for Hoghton Tower was the famous hideaway for priests and their acolytes during Elizabeth I's persecution of Roman Catholics. It represents the hidden and curiously glamorous Catholic world of priest-holes, secret passages and martyrdom. The fiery Jesuit Edmund Campion came here in 1581 from Douai in France via Stratford-upon-Avon, with the young William Shakespeare in tow. The future playwright took his grandfather's name - Shakeshafte - during his stay as a player. For Campion, Hoghton was to be the beachhead of the English Counter-Reformation; but he was betrayed that same year, imprisoned in the Tower of London and martyred for his faith.
The secret world of the Catholic Shakespeare is recreated not only in the oblique entrance to the new centre through the barn, but in the labyrinthine interiors and the corridor leading from the education wing to the library.
Effectively, the house and the new centre will be independent of each other, with very different architectural styles. Helm is no traditionalist and his design plays to history in much the way that a Shakespeare play does: full of references and reinterpretations brought up to date for a contemporary audience.
This, though, is building as landscape: a clever and substantial marriage of ethereal modern architecture with the heavyweight mass of the Pennine edge. Helm points to a precedent elsewhere to give fans of the Bard some inkling of what to expect. "The idea," he says, "is not so very different from I M Pei's pyramid at the Louvre, where a seemingly isolated entrance - ours will be the stone barn - leads into and connects a rich and complex world below."
There is every reason to believe the architecture will work. As for the project as a whole, its champions, led by Sir Bernard and Lady Rosanna de Hoghton; Richard Wilson, professor of English at Lancaster university; David Thacker, the former RSC director; David Fraser, later of Granada TV; and Steven Sohmer, ex-head of Colombia Pictures, are steering it in the direction of the millions of pounds it needs. They are not looking for millennium funds, but expect to be underwritten by Ivy League universities and other Shakespeare-loving US patrons.
When up and running, the theatre is expected to be a showcase for movie stars wanting to prove they can do Shakespeare too, and the focus of a new annual Shakespeare festival. Perhaps its greatest attraction - and the architecture reflects this - is that Hoghton Tower will not become some sort of cheesy Shakespeare heritage attraction, but a living centre for new ways of looking at and intepreting the playwright's peerless output: Hoghton is certainly the right place for such a project, and Helm's architecture the right backdrop for it.