“When I was working at the Royal Court, we would trumpet in our publicity and fund-raising that a lot of the writers now being done at the National were people who were discovered at the Royal Court,” said Kate Horton, who is now the National’s deputy executive director and the point person for management of the Shed. “I think the National has been changing, becoming more of a home for emerging artists. And the Shed is very much that home right now.”

The Shed is no lark for the National. It is a deliberately designed experiment in flexibility that could influence future programming in the Dorfman Theater, and perhaps the other two stages as well, Ms. Horton and Mr. Power said. Most productions, for instance, have traditionally run for a few months at the National; shows at the Shed have run for a handful of nights, a couple of weeks or a month or so, and every so often there are multiple shows being performed in a single day.

On a recent Wednesday, for instance, “Romeo and Juliet” had performances in the late morning and midafternoon, “The Hush” had an evening performance, and “Sea Wall” closed out the night with a 10 p.m. show. Some tickets are also put on sale a few hours before performances, to make happy customers out of last-minute impulse buyers.

“It would be a major development in the history of the National if we could make it routine for a show to pop up for a couple of nights in the Dorfman,” Mr. Power said, “and to have tickets available if people are sitting in a bar and decide they want to come over and see a show at the last minute.”

Ms. Horton said the National planned to take down the Shed once the Dorfman opened, but that the enthusiasm among theatergoers for the Shed might lead to a future life for it if theatrical business partners come forward to help the National preserve it. The Shed’s current location will be unavailable because of an expansion of the National.

Nadia Fall, the writer and director of “Home,” which blends verbatim testimonials of hostel residents with beatboxing and other original music, said that working in the Shed was “like night and day” from her show last summer at the National: a production of Shaw’s “Doctor’s Dilemma” in the National’s Lyttelton Theater, a traditional proscenium stage.

“I had a lot of French windows and mahogany furniture and candelabras and actors in three-piece suits, which is all what people thought of the National as,” Ms. Fall said. “The Shed reminds me of Off Off Broadway or London’s pub theaters — there’s nowhere for artists to hide. The work is exposed. And yet this, too, is at the National now.”