Given the dream commission of designing the Waterside, a brand new theatre for Aylesbury, architect Norman Bragg drove over to look at the site.

“As I first made my way there,” Norman said, “I was struck by the beautiful countryside of Aylesbury Vale, the Chilterns, and the sleek pines which covered the horizons. An idea began to form.”

Stopping at the site for just three seconds — probably as long as it’s possible to stop in Aylesbury’s busy Exchange Street without causing a cacophony of hooting and swearing — Norman drew a quick sketch of how the new theatre might look.

Nearly eight years and £42m later, the finished building, with its revolutionary, wavy roof seemingly supported by 112 timber fins, looks incredibly similar to that first sketch. The roof is designed to reflect the shape of the Chilterns.

“Using the concept of a forest as a starting point,” Norman explained, “We introduced unpredictability into the design to mimic patterns in nature.”

The forest theme is maintained as you enter the theatre’s three-storey high foyer.

“As you look upwards,” Norman continued, “it’s easy to imagine you’re looking through a canopy of branches, with 600 hand-blown glass pendant lights representing raindrops falling through the trees, and the shafts of light that hit the floor evoking a sense of sunlight breaking through the forest canopy.”

There’s more wood in the auditorium. Over 100,000 blocks of timber featuring five different types of wood — each one carefully angled, and put in place by hand — are stacked up the walls, creating a slightly unnerving effect when seen for the first time. Certainly, nobody could call the design dull or bland.

Norman told me that the inspiration came when he was travelling in Switzerland.

“I saw a woodyard with its timber stacked in layers to dry and season. Red and blue lighting is planned to give depth to the stacked timber, and in addition to bring more glitz and glamour to the auditorium. It’s a trick I learnt from working with Sir Cameron Mackintosh on his West End theatres.”

Norman Bragg is a principal director of RHWL’s Arts Team architectural practice. “Like many youngsters with a passion for theatre,” he told me. “I designed and built my own toy puppet theatre at the age of seven. But unlike many others, I was fortunate enough to go on to design real theatres: my first involvement was as a junior trainee on the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, now famous as the home of the World Snooker Championships.”

When I visited the Waterside a couple of weeks ago, carpet layers were still hard at work, and painters were touching up in strategic corners — in the superstitious theatre world, it’s often said to be a sign of good luck if a new theatre still has wet paint somewhere on opening night.

Among the theatre management, there was slight concern about the toilets — among the Waterside’s energy conservation measures is a system to channel rainwater off the roof into the toilet cisterns.

The water could, therefore, look a little discoloured, leading to suggestions that the cleaners had skimped their jobs.

In the auditorium, technical staff were experimenting with the seating — not to see how comfortable it was for a lunch-time snooze, but to check how quickly it could be removed.

For as Aylesbury’s many visitors from across the Oxfordshire boundary will know, the Friars rock club has given the town a national reputation for bands and gigs, headlining many major names over the years.

To enable this reputation to flourish, all the Waterside’s stalls seats can be removed and stored in the basement, taking the theatre’s capacity up from 1,200 fully seated to 1,800 with standing in the stalls.

The Waterside is the brainchild of Aylesbury Vale District Council leader John Cartwright, and the £42m involved has been funded by the council — a pretty breathtaking leap of faith eight years ago, and surely an unthinkable investment in the current financial climate.

Now, it was made plain to me when I visited, Aylesbury’s visionary new theatre has got to work and pull in audiences from far and wide —- including, no doubt, from across Oxfordshire’s eastern boundary.