Venue Theatre editors Shirley Brown (1980s-1990s), Tom Phillips (1990s-2004) and Steve Wright (2004-present) look back over three decades of madcap, inventive and regularly brilliant theatre in Bristol and Bath.

A map of Bristol and Bath’s theatrical venues in 1981 looked very different to its equivalent today. The Rondo (est1992), Ustinov (1997), Alma Tavern Theatre (1998), Tobacco Factory (2000), the egg (2005), Mission Theatre (2005) and Brewery (2009) were all far in the future. Instead, in 80s Bath, you’d get your theatrical kicks at The Central Club (now Chapel Arts), at the Technical College Theatre on Avon Street and, of course, at the Theatre Royal. Walcot Village Hall (aka Walcot Chapel) was also a regular fringe theatre venue.

In Bristol, Montpelier’s Albany Centre was programming adventurous touring theatre under a team headed by one Diana Porter, now a world-famous, Bristol-based jeweller: it also had a hugely respected resident theatre company in Avon Touring Theatre. The Albany and Hotwells’ Hope Centre were the places to catch the thriving small-scale touring theatre scene as exemplified by Red Ladder, Gay Sweatshop, Spare Tyre, Medieval Players and others.

The Inkworks (later Kuumba) in St Pauls specialised in black theatre from the likes of Temba, Black Theatre Co-operative (now Nitro) and Carib Theatre. And in 1983 Trinity staged Reynold Duncan’s ‘Black & White in Colour’, set during the still-recent St Pauls riots and featuring (in the prevailing spirit of racial rapprochement) a white girl cast as the West Indian mother.

Theatre was, indeed, a sight more political in the early 1980s, as witness a host of political and feminist theatre companies and, in 1982, the Women Live! feminist festival. A host of fine small and middle-scale national companies were touring, including the anarchic and wildly popular French circus troupe Archaos (1990-92), plus Compass Theatre, Faulty Optic (still going – coming soon to Mayfest), Foco Novo, Forced Entertainment, Gay Sweatshop, Graeae, Hull Truck, People Show, Red Shift, Shared Experience (whose Brontë comes to TRB soon), TNT and Trestle. The early 1980s women’s theatre movement, meanwhile, featured companies with such stirring names as Cunning Stunts, Flippin Wimmin, Lip Service, Monstrous Regiment, Scarlet Harlets and Spare Tyre, whose comedy musical ‘Just Desserts’ at the Albany was a 1983 highlight.

“In the early 80s small-scale touring shows went through distinctive fashion phases,” Shirley Brown recalls. “For a while, they all seemed to feature masses of clutter on the stage; then there was a spate of live cellists; then a tendency to use refrigerators for atmospheric lighting. For a while, too, we were blessed with a continuation of 1970s agit-prop, wonderfully inventive shows scoring political points against Thatcher's government.”

Vivian Stanshall’s boat The Old Profanity Showboat (aka The Thekla) opened on The Grove in 1984 and closed two years later. In between, though, came Stanshall’s musical ‘Stinkfoot’ (restaged last summer). Venue’s review: “Bemusement is probably the least offensive way to describe my reaction to the first half… excruciating songs, ham acting, sickly sentiment and overall self-indulgence… much of the audience abandoned ship during the interval.” Things got better in the second half, though... Clown theatre/juggling troupe Wack and Zane also staged regular variety revues on board.

On Colston Street, the Little Theatre was a big fixture in the early 1980s. The Theatre, within the Colston Hall complex, had been run by BOV from 1963-1980 and then taken over by The Little Theatre Company (featuring Pete Postlethwaite, David Neilson, Daniel Day-Lewis and one Dick Penny). The LTC produced some lauded shows (‘The Collector’, ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’) but wound up in spring ’83 with a £10,000 deficit. Their swansong was an exclusive author’s own adaptation of Raymond Briggs' ‘When the Wind Blows’. The Little was then used by amateur companies as a central venue till its conversion, in 1987, into a bar.

Arnolfini had a fertile 1980s, presenting a rich programme of visual and experimental theatre. Memorable 80s shows included Second Stride’s ‘Lives of the Great Poisoners’ (with text by Caryl Churchill), DV8’s ‘Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men’ and Station House Opera’s poker-faced comedy of manners ‘Cuckoo’ (1987). King Square’s Arts Centre (now the Cube cinema) presented a range of theatre, art, cinema and poetry, and Ashton Court Festival’s Performing Arts tent featured poetry, dance and comedy. The Folk House programmed theatre throughout the 1980s, and 35 King Street was a regular gallery and performance space.

Bristol Old Vic in 1981 was a traditional regional repertory theatre – but from the mid-80s onwards it suffered, like so many others, from funding problems (Melvyn Bragg wrote an impassioned plea about a round of arts funding cuts in a 1984 Venue – plus ça change…). The Arts Council cut grants because local authorities (Avon in particular) were not paying their agreed share, and grants became contingent on social rather than artistic criteria – insistence, for example, on appealing to a younger, broader, non-traditional theatre audience. By the late 1980s BOV’s Main House was hosting packed public meetings of the Campaign for the Arts In Bristol and Avon (CABA). 1990-91 were literally dark days, with the New Vic (now the Studio) closed and a Save It campaign, appeals from the stage and fundraising buckets in the foyer. There were plenty of memorable shows, though, including 1987’s ‘Rag Doll’, the debut by a then-unknown playwright named Catherine Johnson, later to bestride the globe with ‘Mamma Mia!’. 1988’s vast, Blitz-set community play ‘A Town in the West Country’ roved around the BOV building and the street outside, while 1989’s ‘The Comedy of Errors’ was directed by ‘Mamma Mia!’ director Phyllida Lloyd and featured fabulously wacky design by Anthony Ward. And 1994/95’s ‘Stone Free’ recreated a 1960s rock festival, was written by Jim Cartwright ('Road', ‘Little Voice’) and included the first ever live performance of The Beatles' ‘A Day in the Life’.

The Bristol Hippodrome (100 next year), had a largely fertile three decades, with highlights including huge touring musicals like ‘Barnum’, ‘Rocky Horror’, ‘Cats’, ‘Les Miserables’, ‘Miss Saigon’ and the recent, wonderful ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, complete with flying car – plus, of course, a run for Johnson’s ‘Mamma Mia!’ in 2007. 2006 at the Hippodrome produced two gems: the gentle pleasures of ‘My Fair Lady’ (hats off to Russ Abbott as Eliza Doolittle’s barmaid-fondling old lush of a father) and, at the other end of the spectrum, the profanity-ridden theatricals of ‘Jerry Springer The Opera’. Back in ’92, in less enlightened times, the musical revue ‘That Old Minstrel Magic’ ran into problems – objections to the performers blacking up meant that the show had to be, er, all white on the night.

The roll-call of local companies to come and go is as long as it is exotic. Bath’s roster includes Antidote Theatre, British Events, the ever-present Natural Theatre Company (primarily a street-theatre outfit, though they produced a well-liked full-length play, ‘Eat Me’, in 1983) and Next Stage. In Bristol, Bedminster community troupe acta was founded in 1985 and the wonderful kids’ theatre troupe Travelling Light in 1984. Tony Robinson and others formed Avon Touring in 1977 to produce entertaining small-scale tours with political edge – including Phil Smith's 1983 ‘Great Expectations’ adaptation. Theatre in education troupe Bush Telegraph (1977-1980s) gave us the huge community play ‘Bread and Blood’ in Temple Church in 1982. Street-theatre troupe Desperate Men (another company with a proud history of political agit-prop) got going in 1980; other Bristol companies of note included The Engine Room, Foolscap, British mythology specialists Green Branch Theatre, ace and still-thriving ace puppeteers Green Ginger, Peepolykus and The Playwrights’ Company, a new playwrights’ group that presented an annual showcase, later superseded by Southwest Scriptwriters.

The late 1980s saw the rise of comedy clubs and alternative cabaret, with Venue presenting its own cabaret nights at Watershed and a comic called Frank Skinner as resident compere at the Fleece and Firkin. Comedy/cabaret troupes emerged with names like Piping Hot Dinner Club and Practical Cabaret Company, while Steve Hennessy’s splendid Stepping Out also made their bow. From 1984-1997, Public Parts featured ex-Bristol Uni Drama students including the superb Tim Crouch, doing small-scale adaptations and original stories with political bite – including 1986’s ‘The Sweet Girls’, about Bristol women workers, and an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's ‘The Good Soldier’.

The Hen & Chicken was home to pub-theatre geniuses Show of Strength (of whom more in a mo) from 1989-94, while Theatre West started presenting pub theatre upstairs at Gloucester Road’s Showboat pub in 1990, later opening Bristol's only regular pub theatre at the Alma Tavern in 1998, from where they have run a brilliant annual new-plays season. The excellent TW have championed new writing throughout their two-decade history. Elsewhere, by contrast, the early 1990s saw a move towards 'live art' and more 'conceptual' performance, often deliberately anti-theatrical.

Other key players in BrisBath’s 1980s and 90s theatre scene included acta co-founder Neil Beddow, who pioneered a new form of community play production that was adopted nationwide, and Chris Denys, BOV Theatre School principal from 1981-2006 and an indefatigable, visionary driving force behind its success and expansion. Chris Harris, actor, director, writer, teacher, broadcaster and pantomime dame, was a co-writer (with Denys) and dame for BOV’s pantos from 1992-2000, and director and dame for Theatre Royal Bath’s from 2001 until now. The late Steve Long, leader of Bedminster Down Boys' Club, co-wrote the St Philip's Marsh Community Play ‘Yesterday's Island’, an am-dram phenomenon that started out at Fry's Social Club in 1984 before selling out the 2,000-seater Hippodrome in April 1986 and May 1987. Props too to Kate Pollard (d 2009), a community activist whose work with The Puppet Place raised the profile of puppetry for adults and made Bristol a world centre of the art form (Green Ginger's 'Rust' and  Pickled Image's 'Hunger' being two world-class recent examples). And, of course, ACH Smith, whose plays celebrated our industrial heritage: GWR railwaymen in ‘God's Wonderful Railway’ (Bristol New Vic 1985) and Bristol dockers in ‘Up the Feeder, Down the 'Mouth’ (BOV 1997 and M Shed, 2001). The latter show featured a full-size cargo boat arriving at the dockside to be unloaded – a bolted-down Bristol theatrical highlight for all who witnessed it.

Festivals have come and, for the most part, stayed. Bath Fringe (pictured) started up in 1981, a continuation of the Walcot festivals of the 1970s, and has managed a compelling mix of freewheeling theatrical invention on shoestring budgets ever since. Recent arrivals have included circus and street theatre bash The Bristol Do and BOV’s improvfest The Bristol Jam; the first Bristol Festival of Puppetry in 2009, back later this year; Bath and Bristol Shakespeare Festivals, and Comedy Festivals for both cities.  

By the mid-90s, theatre had pretty much recovered from the Thatcherite cuts in the 80s. You might even say that in the years either side of the millennium there was something of a boom round these parts – especially at the fringier end of things. QEH Theatre hosted inventive touring stuff; the Rondo got a leg-up when Andy Burden took the reins in 2002; Andrew Smaje had started reinventing the Ustinov, launching the adventurous, adult-leaning Bath Puppet Festival and the like; and the first Mayfest hove over the horizon.

Probably the biggest news, though, was the Tobacco Factory opening, with Show of Strength moving in and then putting it on the map with the hugely popular ‘The Wills’s Girls’. SoS had already emerged as one of Bristol’s most important companies, with other highlights including Peter Nichols’s ‘Blue Murder’ (staged in the building now housing Brasserie Blanc, SoS’s home from 1994-97). The company advised George Ferguson on the conversion of the Factory, which opened in 1998.

In 2000, an unknown company calling itself Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (founder Andrew Hilton was a former SoS artistic director) turned up with a production of ‘King Lear’ which soon picked up rave reviews (including Venue’s) and ever-growing audiences. SATTF were the Bristol theatrical story of the Noughties, their intimate, eloquent, stripped-down versions of the Bard winning armies of admirers and getting routine praise from the nationals (and us). Highlights included 2008’s sparse, electrifying ‘Hamlet’ directed with simple elegance by Jonathan Miller. 2006, though, was a troubled year: after poor sales for ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and (especially) the dour, bloody ‘Titus Andronicus’, the company looked to be facing closure, but a huge response to a public appeal (spearheaded by Venue) saved their bacon.

Staying inside the TF, the theatre mustered up gems from across the fringe theatre spectrum (and globe) throughout the decade. Alongside Green Ginger’s superb ‘Rust’ and the brilliant ‘Air Guitar’ by Bristol playwright Peter Kesterton, there was the extraordinary, walkabout ‘Onion Bar’ by pan-Europeans Para Active; ‘Taylor’s Dummies’, an awesome visual thrill by London/Bristol trio Gecko; and a bewitching ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ from Korean troupe Yohangza.

Further evidence of the TF’s rude state of health came in 2009 with the arrival of its studio-theatre sister, The Brewery, which has quickly established itself as one of the best places in town to see entertaining, risk-taking fringe theatre, comedy and dance. In Bath, meanwhile, we welcomed The Mission Theatre, home to consistently adventurous Bath non-pros Next Stage, who in shows like Bryony Lavery’s ‘Frozen’ and Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Festen’ have given us gripping, emotionally devastating theatre that would shame few professional outfits.

At Bristol Old Vic under artistic director Andy Hay’s 1991-2002 tenure, there were some notable productions, too: Arnold Wesker’s controversial ‘Denial’ got its premiere, Tara Fitzgerald starred in ‘Streetcar Named Desire’, and the studio played host to Jez Butterworth’s utterly brilliant ‘Mojo’. BOV staged the first plays by a then-unknown Southville playwright by the name of Kwame Kwei-Armah (‘Elmina’s Kitchen’, a powerful drama set on Hackney's 'Murder Mile', would later get a Main House run in 2005 – “Destined to be one of the first truly great plays of the twenty-first century,” we thought), and the Basement aired works by new playwrights like Sharon Clark and Toby Farrow.

BOV, though, also underwent a major change over these years: Hay left and, after a short interregnum, was replaced by Simon Reade and David Farr. They introduced a programme based on the idea of ‘radical classicism’ – which seemed to up the King Street ante, particularly in the eyes of the national press, and for a few years at least put some interesting takes on classic plays up on the main stage (like 2004’s ‘Beasts and Beauties’, a brilliant and frightening reworking of the fairy-tale canon).

Unfortunately, what nobody quite realised at the time was that this ‘experiment’ would eventually go spectacularly tits up... In May 2007 BOV announced, to almost everyone’s astonishment, that it was closing for a planned 18-month, £7million refurb: Reade was leaving into the bargain (Farr had jumped ship previously). A month later, a second statement also admitted that the BOV company finances were “on the brink of failure” due to a mix of overspending on productions and poor ticket sales. From 2008 onwards, though, things have looked more promising, with Dick Penny’s immediate rescue plan and, more recently, Tom Morris’s stewardship stabilising things for the theatre.

Before all that, though, 2005 was a huge year for Kneehigh’s burgeoning relationship with Bristol (the company’s first show outside Cornwall was at Bristol's Hope Centre). That year, they brought a couple of gems to BOV. ‘The Bacchae’ and ‘Tristan and Yseult’ (pictured) were feasts of joy, laughter, imagination and on-stage derring-do, and Kneehigh had won themselves legions of Bristol admirers who’d troop back to see later shows like ‘Don Juan’, ‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘Nights at the Circus’.

For the past few years, meanwhile, we’ve seen a flood of innovation and experimentation to compare with those early 80s years. Take, for example, ‘Kursk’, Sound and Fury’s bewitching account of life for a group of submariners caught in a diplomatic incident in the remote Barents Sea. Or ‘Ivan and the Dogs’, Hattie Naylor’s stunning tale of a boy who ran the streets with a pack of Moscow dogs. Theatre has broken out everywhere – witness, for example, Back to Back Theatre’s ‘Small Metal Objects’, a portrait of a fumbled drug deal which confounded Broadmead audiences, shoppers and even officers of the law, or Splice Productions’ ‘SUS’, Barrie Keefe’s drama about race relations and policing at the dawn of Thatcher’s Britain, staged in (of course) a disused police station: so good, it brought our reviewer out in profanities.

Other recent highlights have included Adam Peck/Fairground's ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ for its perfect production and leftfield music and script; Shakespeare's Globe’s open-air ‘Romeo & Juliet’ in Queens Square, with a thunderstorm threatening, and the balcony scene played through the sunroof of a beaten-up VW van; and 2005 Xmas show ‘Robin Hood’ at the Tobacco Factory, with a hand-built oak forest, real arrows being fired and an audience of rioting children dressed in Lincoln Green.

Mayfest has consistently surprised and delighted – we’ve loved ‘Black Tonic’, a promenade psycho-mystery around a Redcliffe hotel; ‘The Smile Off Your Face’, in which Belgian outfit Ontroerend Goed offered audiences a blindfolded wheelchair ride and left our scribe in tears; and Mem Morrison's wonderful one-man show ‘Leftovers',  performed in a Bedminster greasy spoon. Ontroerend Goed returned last year with intimate one-to-oner ‘Internal’, which left our reviewer “angry, exhilarated, depressed, delirious, panicked, betrayed, exploited and joyous”; and there’ve been wonderful performances by local companies like Publick Transport, Tinned Fingers, Dave Fish Theatre and The Special Guests.

Theatre Bristol have, of late, changed the theatre ecology in Bristol, developing collaborations, artists and companies: the doors are open again to makers at Bristol Old Vic (see its prolific Ferment strand), as they always have been at the Tobacco Factory. Performers and writers emerging recently include Tom Wainwright, Ed Rapley, Adam Peck and Idiot Child. Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, meanwhile, has turned out classes of brilliantly talented actors and directors year after year, with 2009-10 a particularly fine vintage featuring a harrowing ‘Crucible’ and a funny, tragic and genuinely touching ‘Translations’.

Early in the Noughties, Theatre Royal Bath took the inspired step of asking theatrical giant Peter Hall to programme (and, mostly, direct) an annual summer season. Highlights have included 2004’s ‘Don Juan’, which packed the legendary love-rat’s amatory antics into a breakneck 90 minutes, and 2008’s hilarious, touching re-awakening of Alan Bennett’s early play ‘Enjoy’, with Alison Steadman as an ageing Leeds housewife. TRB continued, though, to pack in the household names all year round – in 2007 alone, visitors included Kendal, Keith, Conti, Mayall, Sher, Steadman and Suchet. Last year we bowed down before Simon Callow’s Bard in ‘The Man from Stratford’ and gasped admiringly at the big, brilliant community production of ‘Ben Hur’ by the productive Hattie Naylor/Lee Lyford duo. The National Theatre have been prolific and brilliant visitors, including 2008’s unforgettable staging of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’; Mike Leigh’s ‘Two Thousand Years’ (2006, pictured top); and 2005’s visit of Martin McDonagh’s gruesome and appallingly funny ‘The Pillowman’.

The Ustinov enjoyed a hugely fruitful decade under the stewardship of AD Andrew Smaje, programming a bunch of brilliant in-house productions of modern classics including ‘Carthage Must Be Destroyed’, ‘Gagarin Way’ and ‘Outlying Islands’, which used a story of two scientists adrift on a remote Hebridean island as a springboard for an extraordinary tale of murder, romance, silent movies and supercharged sex. Last summer’s pair of in-house shows, ‘The Chairs’ and ‘The Good Soldier’, were both triumphs.

There’s been plenty of buzz locally over promenade theatre over the last few years, largely re-awakened by the Invisible Circus and their spectacular walkabout shows in neglected old hangars like Clifton’s Pro Cathedral and, currently, the Old Bridewell police and fire stations. The Wonder Club also seized the walkabout baton, staging a trio of gothic, powerful, sensuous and involving shows at Trinity, an old motorcycle showroom on Stokes Croft and a former training hospital in Redcliffe; and Show of Strength have given us walkabout marvels including ‘Trade It?’ and the alt.Bedminster tour ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2011

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