Find out all you need to know about 'The Bristol Old Vic' with our extensive fact file.
Bristol's Theatre Royal isn't the oldest theatre in Britain. There must be scores of inns and great houses, which can claim to have been staging plays before it, and, of course, the UK is littered with the remains of Roman amphitheatres where dramas would have been enacted. However, the Theatre Royal was the oldest theatre still in everyday use until 1007, and is also the one with the longest unbroken record of use.
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Money for the theatre was raised through an early example of business sponsorship of the arts: 50 Bristol merchants each promised to give £50 to pay for the new building. One of the merchants subsequently dropped out but a number of lesser subscribers came forward to bring the total kitty to £5,000. The pound in the 1760's was worth £52 at 1990 values, which means the theatre fund was the equivalent of more than £250,000 at 1990 prices.
In recognition of their support, each of the £50 subscribers received a silver token, entitling them¸ and their heirs the right to a sight (not a seat) at every performance in the Theatre Royal forever. Inadequate record keeping encouraged forgery of the tokens and one remained in dispute until 1900. The current management still honours the tokens.
The subscribers engaged Thomas Paty as their architect for a fee of £200 (£10,400 in 1990) and asked him to work to plans they had obtained of the first Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
Paty worked fairly closely to Wren's designs but introduced one extremely significant change. Theatres had hitherto been rectangular, like the pub yards and great house salons from which they developed. Paty curved his auditorium into horseshoe shape, so setting a trend in British theatre design.
The foundation stone of the new theatre was laid in November 1764, on a site once partly occupied by Bristol's 13th century city walls, marked on old maps as Ye Racky. The name lives on in the name of the road, The Rackhay, which leads to the Stage Door. In those days the theatre didn't have a frontage on to King Street and it could only be reached by walking through a house, which stood, on the street itself.
The theatre opened on 30th May 1766 with a programme, which included a comedy The Conscious Lovers, and a farce The Miller of Mansfield. For the first 12 years of its existence it didn't have the necessary licence to put on plays so described its offerings as Concerts of Music and Specimens of Rhetorick. It only gained a legal right to advertise plays openly in 1778 after George 111 granted the Letters Patent, which also entitled a change of name. At its opening the building was the Bristol Theatre; after getting the Kings approval it became the Theatre Royal and hung the Arms of the House of Hanover in the auditorium.
The theatre received its first royal visitor in the year it opened when the Duke of York came to see The Clandestine Marriage. The Bristol Herald reported, we hear His Royal Highness expressed a high approbation of the structure of the performance?. Since then the theatre has had many Royal guests and was especially popular with Queen Mary during her wartime stay at Badminton.
Royal Coat of Arms appears twice in the theatre and above the rear stalls and above the Royal Box. The Arms of the City are incorporated into the ceiling design.
The original colour scheme for the theatre was green and gold and featured decorative work believed to be by Michael Edkins, whose speciality was china painting for the Bristol Potteries.
For the first 40 years or so of its life the Theatre Royal had seating on only two levels. The area now occupied by the most expensive seats and the rear and front stalls was the pit, into which the great unwashed were crammed. The dress stalls were divided into boxes, each entered by a separate door, above which was inscribed the name of a leading dramatist, such as Shakespeare, Jonson and Sheridan. Wealthy people would buy all the seats in a box and hence the need for a box office.
In Georgian times, performances started at 6.30pm but patrons were advised to send their servants by 5pm to keep places.
The third tier was added in about 1800 when the theatre's lessee was John Palmer. It involved raising and sloping the ceiling but Palmer was no stranger to ambitious schemes. He is credited with the invention of the stagecoach Royal Mail.
The Theatre Royal used candles for lighting until the installation of gas in 1820 and wax ones on First Nights and cheaper tallow ones at other times. Electricity was introduced in 1906.
Nearly all of the greatest 18th and 19th century actors appeared at the Theatre Royal, including Mrs Jordon, Grimaldi, Quick, the Kembles, Edmund Kean and Sarah Siddons. David Garrick never performed here but he did write the prologue for the opening performance. Other star guests included opera legend Jenny Lind, The Swedish Nightingale, and Taglioni, probably the 19th century's greatest ballerina.
The theatre remained in the hands of successors to the original subscribers until 1925 when it passed into private hands.
The theatre's fortunes were subject to frequent rises and falls but its greatest time of danger was during World War Two when Bristol suffered severe bombing. One direct hit on King Street destroyed a large part of the historic Llandoger Trow but amazingly, the wooden framed theatre escaped with only slight damage. One story credits its survival to the bravery of the Stage Door Keeper. He is supposed to have had only one leg and to have spent his nights on the roof, using his wooden leg to kick away the incendiary bombs, which rained down on the area.
In 1942 the theatre was put up for auction and became the centre of a cause celebre. Because the bombs had wrecked so many commercial premises, there was a strong likelihood the theatre would be converted into warehousing. An appeal fund was set up to save the theatre and two benefactors, Mr. C H W Davey and Mr. Ellison Fuller Eberle gave stopgap loans to secure the purchase of the building for £10,500.
Wartime shortages made it impossible to get materials needed to refurbish the building but the CEMA the forerunner of the Arts Council stepped in with an offer to lease the building from the Trustees. The lease was signed on 31st December 1942, at which point the Theatre Royal became the first state theatre in the country.
Appearing this month in 2002
Title: Betrayal Author: Harold Pinter