Bristol Old Vic : Attaraction of Bristol

The Bristol Old Vic is a theatre complex and theatrical company in the centre of Bristol, England. The complex includes the 1766 Theatre Royal, which claims to be the oldest continually-operating theatre in England, along with a 1970s studio theatre, offices and backstage facilites. It also incorporates the eighteenth-century Coopers’ Hall as its foyer. The Theatre Royal is a grade I listed building, while the Coopers’ Hall is grade II*. The present company was established in 1946 as an offshoot of the London Old Vic theatre. It is also affiliated with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, a well-regarded school for both actors and technicians.

History of Bristol Old Vic

The theatre is situated on the quiet cobbled King Street, a few yards from the Floating Harbour. The Coopers’ Hall is the earliest surviving building on the site, having been built in 1744 for the Coopers’ Company, the guild of coopers in Bristol, by architect William Halfpenny. It has a “debased Palladian” façade with four Corinthian columns. It only remained in the hands of the Coopers until 1785, subsequently becoming a public assembly room, a wine warehouse, a Baptist chapel and eventually a fruit and vegetable warehouse.

The “Theatre in King Street” was built between 1764 and 1766 on land behind and to one side of the Coopers’ Hall, with a passage through one of the houses in front of it serving as an entranceway. The interior was modelled, with some variations, on that of the Drury Lane Theatre Royal in London. The first performance, on 30 May 1766, included a prologue and epilogue by David Garrick. However, the theatre was initially unable to obtain a Royal Licence, and had to advertise its productions as “a concert with a specimen of rhetorick” to avoid prosecution under the Licensing Act, 1737. This pretence was dropped after two years, though a touring production playing in the Coopers’ Hall in 1773 did run into legal trouble.

The Royal Licence, and the name “Theatre Royal", were eventually gained in 1778. At this time the theatre also started opening for the winter season, and a joint company was established to perform at both the Bath Theatre Royal and in Bristol, featuring famous names including Sarah Siddons, whose ghost, according to legend, haunts the Bristol theatre. The auditorium was remodelled with a new sloping ceiling and gallery in 1800. After the break with Bath in 1819 the theatre was managed by William M’Cready, the father of William Charles Macready, with little success, but slowly rose again under his widow Sarah M’Cready in the 1850s. After her death in 1853 the M’Creadys’ son-in-law James Chute took over, but allowed the Theatre Royal to decline again when he opened the Prince’s Theatre in 1867. A new, but still unsatisfactory, entranceway was constructed in 1903.

The Theatre Royal remained in the shadow of the Prince’s for over 70 years, until the Prince’s was destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. The threat of closure in 1942 led to a public appeal to preserve the historic theatre, and as a result a new Trust was established to buy the building. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts leased the building from the Trust and in 1946 CEMA’s successor the Arts Council arranged for a company from the London Old Vic to staff it, thus forming the Bristol Old Vic. The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School was also established in 1946. The Bristol Old Vic had its greatest triumph when its 1954 production Salad Days transferred to the West End and became the longest-running musical on the London stage. The Arts Council remained involved until 1963 when their role was taken over by the City Council. The Bristol Old Vic also put plays on in the council-owned Little Theatre from then until 1980.

The present theatre complex, designed by Peter Moro, was completed in 1972. The entrance building was demolished, as were a number of surrounding buildings and, more controversially, the stage area of the 1766 theatre. A new stage and fly tower were built along with technical facilities and offices. The 150-seat New Vic Studio Theatre was built in place of the old entrance, and the Coopers’ Hall provided the theatre with the grand façade and foyer area it had previously lacked.

Current activities

The theatre has enjoyed a small renaissance since a new Arts Coucil funding package and the appointment of David Farr and Simon Reade as joint artistic directors in January 2003. The company briefly branded itself as the “new bristol old vic” and its two theatres are now called the “main house” and the “studio", and house audiences of 400 and 150 respectively. As well as hosting its own productions and Theatre School performances, it also provides a venue for small touring groups and local theatre companies. It thus remains the main venue for highbrow professional theatre in the city, while major commercial touring productions generally visit the much larger Bristol Hippodrome. Farr left Bristol to join the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in the summer of 2005, leaving Reade as sole artistic director. The main house pantomime for December 2005 and January 2006 is a new adaptation of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp based on the version by popular children’s author Philip Pullman.

Despite a number of closures, due to reconstruction, economics and war, the Theatre Royal has remained a playhouse continually since 1766, and thus claims the title of “Britain’s oldest continually working theatre". The auditorium retains a small area of the original bench seating in the gallery and the original “thunder-run” in which cannonballs would be rolled down a wooden frame in the roof to simulate the sound of a storm.

Touring

The Bristol Old Vic has a long history of taking productions on tour both within the United Kingdom and overseas. In March 1973, led by Paul Eddington and Judy Campbell the Company helped launch the first Hong Kong International Arts Festival with productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Congreve’s The Double Dealer. During its visit the Company also appeared in a radio production for Radio Hong Kong of The Importance of Being Earnest with Judy Campbell as Lady Bracknell, Stephen Moore as Jack and Elizabeth Power as Gwendolyn.

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School now operates under Principal Christopher Denys as an affiliate of the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama with some courses validated by the University of the West of England. It has its own premises in Clifton, bought with proceeds from the London success of Salad Days. It previously had working links with the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, which still holds many papers of the Bristol Old Vic in its Theatre Collection. For many years it presented regular student productions in the Department’s experimental Drama Studio converted from an indoor tennis court off a corridor in the Wills Building behind the University’s famous Bell Tower at the top of Bristol’s fashionable Park Street. Students from the School and the Drama Department shared many of each others’ formal lectures and a number of the Department’s graduates went on to continue their studies as full-time students at the School.

Having struggled with limited resources until the 1960s, the School now has access to a number of performing venues, including the private Redgrave Theatre at Clifton College. (The theatre was named after the actor Sir Michael Redgrave, who was an old boy of the College.) It also takes productions on tour to various locations in the nearby West Country, a tradition dating back to the 1950s when for several years students moved to Dartington Hall in South Devon for two weeks each spring where they rehearsed and presented a public production in the Barn Theatre. While the School was able to use broadcasting studio facilities at the University Drama Studio for radio drama training in the 1950s and also ran occasional courses in conjunction with the BBC at their Bristol Studios in Whiteladies Road, in 1996 it was able to acquire its own production facilities, Christchurch Studios, a suite of fully-equipped former BBC radio studios in Clifton.

The School began life in October 1946, only eight months after the founding of its parent Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company, in a room above a fruit merchant’s warehouse in the Rackhay near the stage door of the Theatre Royal. (The yard of the derelict St Nicholas School adjacent to the warehouse was still used by the Company for rehearsals of crowd scenes and stage fights as late as the early 1960s, notably for John Hale’s productions of Romeo and Juliet starring the Canadian actor Paul Massie and Annette Crosbie, a former student of the School, and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac with Peter Wyngarde. Students from the Theatre School frequently played in these crowd scenes and fights.)

The School continued in these premises for eight years because of the Old Vic’s lack of funds in the post-war decade until 1954 when the Company produced a small-scale end-of season topical musical for the entertainment of regular patrons and to allow the actors to let their hair down after a season of mainly serious productions.

This musical, Salad Days by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, proved very popular with Bristol audiences and was subsequently transferred to London’s West End where it was an instanteous hit and played for more than four years, making it the longest running production in West End history at the time. Since then it has never been out of production somewhere in the world and has become part of theatre history. £7,000 from the Salad Days profits - a large sum in those days - was given to the School towards the purchase and conversion of two large adjoining Victorian villas at 1 and 2 Downside Road in Clifton. In 1995 the enduring benefit to students of that donation was formally recognised when a new custom-built dance and movement studio in the School’s back garden was named the Slade/Reynolds Studio.

Many distinguished members of the theatrical profession have taught at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Perhaps the best known was the legendary Rudi Shelly, who joined the teaching staff only two weeks after the School opened in 1946 and was still working, conducting a master-class from his hospital bed, just hours before his death at the age of 90 in May 1998. Former students from around the world gathered in Bristol for his funeral at which the eulogy was delivered by former student Stephanie Cole. Apart from students of the School, over the years many established actors from around the world sought out Rudi Shelly’s master classes when visiting or working in England.

At the time of the School’s move to its current premises in Downside Road, Clifton, in 1956, the Principal was Duncan (Bill) Ross, who had succeeded the first Principal, Edward Stanley in 1954. After guiding the School through seven difficult years that are nonetheless still regarded by his former students as a golden age, Ross left in late 1961 to take up a teaching post in the USA. Soon after the departure of this much-loved principal, other key staff members resigned, including Daphne Heard and Maggie Collins, and Paula Gwyn-Davies, the School Secretary.

After a short interregnum under the actor Richard Ainley, the post of Principal was taken by Nat Brenner, a distinguished actor and theatre technician and, at that time, General Manager of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre. Brenner’s stewardship was regarded by students of the time as another golden age. He remained in the post until 1980, when he was succeeded by the current Principal, Christopher Denys.

The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, as its name suggests, is not simply a school for actors. It provides comprehensive training courses for all theatre, radio, film, and television professionals and its graduates are to be found in key positions as actors, directors, set designers, costumer designers, lighting designers and stage and company managers througout the world.

Among the many hundreds of distinguished actors on the School’s list of alumni are

Miranda Richardson - Best Actress Academy Award nominee
Daniel Day-Lewis - Best Actor Academy Award winner
Greta Scacchi
Jeremy Irons - Best Actor Academy Award winner
Patricia Routledge CBE
Patrick Stewart OBE
Pete Postlethwaite OBE - Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominee
Stephanie Cole OBE
Annette Crosbie
Patricia Brake
Milton Johns
Robert Lang
John McEnery
Brian Blessed
Tim Pigott-Smith
Norman Rossington
Amanda Redman
Julian Slade
Jane Lapotaire
Gene Wilder