Old Vic at 250 – Expanding theatre’s reach

As we sit down, Lucy Hunt, outreach producer at the Bristol Old Vic, hands me a page-long list with tiny print. It’s a list of current and potential outreach programmes at the Old Vic, used to give young people, artists and other individuals from all over Bristol a chance to be creative and hone their theatrical talents.

“There’s so much,” says Lucy. “We won’t get to talk about everything.”

Lucy and her coworker, Young Company and participation producer Sian Eustace, speak enthusiastically about their efforts to broaden the theatre’s reach to people who might not think the theatre is there for them.

“We’ve got a real commitment to sort of blasting open the doors and letting people in,” says Lucy. “Our role in the theatre is finding new audiences, working with people outside the building and bringing new people in.”

They do this through programmes like Young Company, which Sian produces. Young Company brings in 350 young people, aged five to 25, from all over the city for weekly theatre sessions. The programme offers financial subsidies for youths who can’t afford to attend. 

“We focus heavily on ensemble and working as a group,” says Sian. “Often [the cast] will leave the dressing room and not go back because they’re on stage the whole time.”

Graduates of Young Company, as well as many others coming to the Old Vic for the first time, sometimes go on to Made in Bristol, a programme now in it sixth year which trains young adults in all aspects of theatre-making. At the end of the academic year, the twelve students have a fully formed theatre company.

“A lot of them stay in Bristol and continue working for us and direct their own company shows,” says Sian.

Sam Bailey, 26, and Maisie Newman, 22, both received transformative training from the Made in Bristol programme. 

“You learn how to be a professional,” says Maisie of her experience with Made in Bristol. “You lead and assist with workshops and work with artists coming in and out. 

“Basically, I learned loads of things about the industry that I would have had no idea about otherwise. You learn to work as a group and make things happen.”

“There’s a holistic nature to the training,” says Sam, who began writing for theatre after moving to Bristol at age 20 and attending a Young Company session with his sister. “I came into theatre thinking the jobs were clearly defined. But that’s not the Bristol scene, is it? Here we come at it in a much more all-encompassing way.”

Maisie says doing more collaborative work and experiencing all aspects of theatre has helped inform her work, no matter what she’s doing. She now works as a theatre maker and movement specialist, and is currently working on St Joan of the Stockyards as an assistant director and movement director at the Old Vic among several other projects.

Sam, similarly, has continued to work in theatre. He is involved with an offshoot group from the Old Vic, The Old Vic 12, and is working on his “biggest play yet”, Prince of the River. He’s also working on an as-yet-untitled work for the Tobacco Factory.

In addition to working with young people in the theatre, Sian and Lucy run Playhouse theatre programmes in schools in all parts of Bristol to reach students without access to high quality theatre education. 

“It’s a good way of working with schools that might be considered hard to reach, whether that’s geographically or socioeconomically,” says Sian. “Because it’s such a low cost project it’s really great to engage those schools that might not necessarily be able to afford that kind of support in any other way.”

The Playhouse programme trains teachers to take up the mantel and continue to give kids a drama education, even after their year with the Old Vic has finished.

“It’s about leaving a trained drama specialist in each of the schools, and teachers feeling really confident in delivering theatre and drama,” says Sian. 

But not all outreach programmes are year-long engagements. Open Stage, which allows anyone in the city with talent to come and perform for ten minutes on the Old Vic stage on specific Sundays.

“We’ve had two Sundays where we’ve had between six and seven hours of activity on the stage,” says Lucy.

Other outreach efforts include pilot projects with hard-to-reach community groups, a long term project with Addiction Recovery Agency, a Southmead Soap Opera set in houses along actual street in Southmead and more. They’re hoping to create a show someday soon with a half-hearing and half-deaf cast and create a homeless project with St Mungoes.

We don’t get to cover all of the Old Vic’s outreach programmes after all – Lucy’s list contains 58 different enacted and proposed classes, walks, projects, mentorships and more.

In the end, though, all these programmes are about one thing: making the Old Vic not just a playground for the elite but a creative hub for everyone in Bristol.

“Sian and I, we love our events where we have school kids from completely random bits of the city and they bring their parents in,” says Lucy. “Of course, their parents haven’t been here before, and that’s my favourite bit of the job – when this building is full of people that don’t normally come here.”

To celebrate the Old Vic’s 250th birthday weekend (May 28-30), the oldest theatre in the English-speaking world will put on series of Bristol-wide projects when the Theatre, foyers, Studio and the street beyond will be handed over to the people of Bristol for a weekend of entertainment created by Bristolians of all ages, backgrounds and abilities.

Read more: Old Vic at 250 – behind the scenes