Heritage, Capital and Culture: The Ghost of’ sarah’ at the Bristol Old Vic

Abstract

In March 2011 Bristol’s Georgian Theatre Royal, originally built in 1766, closed its doors for eighteen months as part of an extensive £19.26 million redevelopment of the Bristol Old Vic complex. In addition to the refurbishment and modernization of the theatre auditorium, new rehearsal rooms, office spaces, backstage areas and dressing rooms were created, and the fly tower updated. Throughout the building work, the Georgian theatre auditorium dominated official press releases, captured the public imagination and prompted both excitement and anxiety from the Old Vic’s multiple stakeholders. However, the primary objective of the redevelopment work was not restoration. Whilst the work undertaken in the Grade I listed Georgian auditorium was necessarily governed by authorities such as English Heritage and Bristol City Council, and steered by an advisory panel of historians, it was not the aim to present audiences with a museum-piece theatre.¹ Instead, the intent was to deliver a space that fused the Theatre Royal’s past (identified by the lead architect on the project as its ‘spirit’) with its present as the Old Vic — a twenty-first-century producing and receiving house.² The theatre’s spirit proved to be a recurrent theme during the redevelopment work, and was repeatedly linked to Bristol’s outstanding cultural heritage of its past performers and managers.