Bristol Old Vic - History of The Theatre

History of The Theatre

The theatre is situated on King Street, a few yards from the Floating Harbour. Since 1972, the public entrance is through the Coopers' Hall, 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 to designs by James Saunders, David Garrick's carpenter at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Westminster. Saunders had provided drawings for the Theatre Royal in Richmond, Surrey built the previous year, in 1765. A long section (1790, at Harvard University Theatre Collection) and a survey plan (1842, at the Local Studies Library) of the Theatre Royal Richmond, Surrey, demonstrate just how much the Richmond Surrey Theatre Royal compared with the New Bristol Theatre. Setting aside the fact that Bristol was the larger of the two, their designs are proportionally comparable, if not identical. They provided identical relationships between actors on the stage and spectators who surrounded them on three sides, albeit with the great majority to the front. Saunders was doubtless as busy staging productions at Drury Lane as Garrick depicts him in his hit play A Peep Behind the Curtain (1767). This explains why the Proprietors of Bristol's New Theatre appointed Bristol architect Thomas Paty to supervise construction of the "New Theatre" between 1764 and 1766. (This also explains why some architectural historians have mistakenly listed Paty as this theatre's "architect".) The site chosen was "Rackhay Yard", close to the newly built Merchant's Library. Rackhay Yard (like Riding Yard, the site of Garrick's and Saunder's Drury Lane Theatre Royal) was a roughly rectangular empty site behind a row of medieval houses and to one side of the also recently built Coopers' Hall (William Halfpenny, 1743). Two (and possibly three) new passageways built through the ground floor of the houses fronting King Street gave access to Rackhay Yard and the "New Theatre" inside it. The design of the auditorium was based, with some variations, on that of the Drury Lane Theatre Royal in London. The theatre opened on 30 May 1766 with a performance which including a prologue and epilogue given by David Garrick. As the proprietors were not able to obtain a Royal Licence, productions were announced as "a concert with a specimen of rhetorick" to evade the restrictions imposed on theatres by the Licensing Act 1737. This ruse was soon abandoned, but a production in the neighbouring Coopers' Hall in 1773 did fall foul of this law.

Legal concerns were alleviated when the Royal Letters Patent were eventually granted in 1778, and the theatre became a patent theatre and took up the name "Theatre Royal". 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 rebuilt 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. Following her death in 1853 the M'Creadys' son-in-law James Chute took over, but he lost interest in the Theatre Royal, which fell into decline when he opened the Prince's Theatre, originally known as the New Theatre Royal, in 1867. A new, narrow entrance was constructed through an adjacent building in 1903.