Haworth Tompkins’s clever redesign of the Bristol Old Vic makes a virtue of its past and injects some drama into the foyer. And when will Denise Scott Brown get the respect she deserves?
When James Saunders, carpenter to the great actor and theatre manager David Garrick, built what is now the Bristol Old Vic, he wouldn’t have expected it still to be there 250 years later, proudly proclaimed as the oldest continuously working theatre in the English-speaking world. In the 18th century an auditorium would usually be thrown up with some of the spirit and techniques of a stage set, a thing to be done and undone, and be only somewhat longer lived. What with fires, bankruptcies and other hazards, says the theatre’s artistic director, Tom Morris, an 18th-century theatre had a life expectancy of 17 years.
It’s the provisional quality of theatre that a lot of architects, ever in search of a permanent personal monument, don’t understand. It helps explain why the architects of the Bristol Old Vic’s reworking, Haworth Tompkins, get repeatedly asked to work on theatres. Their completed projects tend to carry a sense of being unfinished. They offer the sense and reality of change.
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