Post date: Jan 10, 2018 11:16:12 AM
This is part 2 of 3 of our report on the launch of Bristol Old Vic’s 2018 programme. We continue to focus on BOV’s own productions in this historic year during which the theatre is literally opened up to the city for the first time since it was built almost 252 years ago.
In October Twelfth Night will be co-produced with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and directed by The Lyceum’s Associate Director Wils Wilson. The year will end and lead us into 2019 with a new version of A Christmas Carol, for which the creative team is due to be announced shortly.
2018 as a Year of Change is inspired by the anniversaries of some significant and powerful advocates for change; the 50th anniversaries of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the Black Power salute, the 70th anniversary of the voyage of the Windrush, the centenary of women’s suffrage and the bicentenary of the birth of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Bristol Old Vic is participating in a city-wide process, re-examining our relationship with our past and, alongside many others in the city, resolving to look afresh at Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, which made it so wealthy and contributed so strongly to many of its most beautiful buildings, including our theatre.
BOV’s ambition as a theatre is to be a place where the city can hold itself, its history and its future to account, and where those histories can be re-understood, so it is pleased that the Year of Change programme can also accommodate this powerful and important conversation.
As part of that conversation, Bristol Old Vic has commissioned a major new play. See the February edition for a report on that and related activities.