Whatever the need for rewiring and new seating at the Bristol Old Vic, there’s no doubt that everything connected with its impending closure has been abysmally handled. A board meeting was called at 24 hours’ notice and then, without any apparent warning, the autumn season that had already been partly announced was cancelled. The artistic director walked out. Most of the staff were told that they would lose their jobs. It was curtains for the Vic for 18 months and maybe beyond.

All this happened in May without the theatre having raised the final £2 million necessary to ensure that work costing a total of £7 million could actually be carried out. That’s panic, not planning or management.

It’s not as if we’re talking about some pokey seaside rep. Bristol Old Vic serves a great city and a large part of the West, and the Georgian auditorium at its core remains one of the world’s most beautiful. True, there has been local criticism of its departing director, Simon Reade. True, not all of his offerings have been crowd-pullers. True, he has sometimes struggled to make a financial success of a theatre with only 650 seats to sell.

Nevertheless, Times critics have been impressed by recent revivals of Rostand’s Cyrano and Ibsen’s Ghosts and a bold adaptation of the Noah story, Not the End of the World. And would Kenneth Branagh have agreed to stage Chekhov’s Ivanov there this autumn, or major theatre companies planned co-productions with Bristol Old Vic of Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood and an adaptation of Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings, if this were not an important, respected playhouse?

It seems unthinkable that such a place could close permanently but, even if the Old Vic reopens on schedule in late 2008 or early 2009, what kind of theatre will it be? Will it be a receiving house for touring productions of uneven quality, not a playhouse that continues to produce its own work? Will it be a pretty receptacle for conferences, as is already threatened? Or, will it have become a sad mess that will send some Bristolians off to the more enterprising Tobacco Factory on the edges of Bristol and others to the Theatre Royal in Bath?

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