The Old Vic

Listen for a moment. Buses grind past on Waterloo Road, a train brakes somewhere behind you, and footsteps drift toward the cafés along The Cut. Then look up at the pale facade on the corner. Its tall windows and painted lettering face the traffic. On a show night, light spills from the doors onto the pavement, and you can hear the low murmur of people waiting to go in. This is the Old Vic, one of the oldest working theatres in London.

The theatre opened in 1818, on what was then the rough southern edge of the city. A new bridge had just crossed the Thames nearby. The bridge brought people, and the builders hoped those people would want entertainment. The theatre took the name Royal Coburg, after Princess Charlotte and her husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. That was a fashionable name for a house that was not, at first, very fashionable at all.

The south bank in those years was not elegant. Theatres north of the river held special licences to perform serious spoken drama. Houses like this one were pushed toward melodrama, music, spectacle and noise. So the early audiences here came for villains, rescues, songs and sensation. According to accounts from the period, the theatre once tried to impress the crowd with a curtain made of mirrors. The audience could see their own faces reflected back at them. The story is a good one, and it fits the spirit of the place.

In 1833 the theatre took a new name. It became the Royal Victoria, in honour of the young princess who would soon become queen. Londoners shortened it, the way Londoners do. The Royal Victoria became simply the Vic, and later the Old Vic. The nickname stayed for nearly two centuries. It is a small reminder that a building belongs, in the end, to the people who use it, and not to the names on its front.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Vic had a hard reputation. The neighbourhood was poor and crowded. Drink was cheap, and nights here could be loud and rowdy. Then, in 1880, a social reformer named Emma Cons took control of the building. She was a woman with strong views about alcohol and about working people. She turned the theatre into a temperance music hall — a place for songs, lectures and coffee instead of gin.

Here is the first surprise. Emma Cons did more than run concerts. She organised lectures for local working men and women in rooms connected to the theatre. Those classes grew into Morley College, an adult education college that still exists in this part of London today. So this building helped start a school. When you think of a theatre, you may picture actors and stages. The Vic also carried chalk dust, notebooks and evening students.

Emma Cons had a niece, Lilian Baylis, and she is the person most closely tied to this theatre's fame. Baylis took over the management and ran the Vic with very little money and very large ambition. From around the time of the First World War, she began to stage Shakespeare season after season, at prices ordinary people could afford. By the early 1920s, the company had performed every play in Shakespeare's First Folio — the first collected edition of his works.

Lilian Baylis became a legend in her own lifetime, and many stories about her are told with affection. People say she cooked her meals on a small stove in her office near the stage. Others recall her as blunt, devout and stubborn about money. Whatever the exact truth of each tale, her achievement is clear. She also helped create the companies that later became the Royal Ballet and English National Opera. Two of Britain's major national arts companies grew from her work.

That is the second surprise for many visitors. The roots of British national theatre, ballet and opera run back to this corner of Waterloo. Baylis had a simple idea. Great art should not belong only to the wealthy. A clerk, a dock worker or a shop assistant should be able to sit in a seat and watch Shakespeare. That idea seems normal now. In her time, it was close to radical.

The Second World War brought damage. German bombing during the Blitz hit the building in 1941, and the theatre had to close for repairs. It reopened after the war and returned to serious drama. Then, in 1963, a new chapter began. The newly formed National Theatre company made its home here, led by the actor Laurence Olivier. For more than a decade, this stage was effectively the nation's stage, until the company moved to its own concrete building on the South Bank in the 1970s.

Today the Old Vic is an independent theatre. It does not depend on one permanent company, and it presents new plays, revivals and musicals. Inside, the auditorium is horseshoe-shaped, with curved balconies stacked one above another. Plaster decoration and warm colours wrap around the seats. Even the highest rows feel close to the stage. That closeness is part of the experience. An actor's whisper can reach the back wall, and the audience feels the room breathe together.

Step back now and take in the street around you. Across the road, The Cut runs east, with small restaurants and the modern Young Vic theatre, a younger sister born from this house. Waterloo Station sits just behind you, so the theatre has always been a place people reach on foot from the trains. Office workers, students and theatre fans all pass this corner every day. Many walk by without a glance. You now know a little more than they do.

Before you move on, look once more at the front of the building. Notice the lettering, the windows, the steps where crowds have gathered for more than two hundred years. Think of the melodrama crowds, the coffee drinkers, the evening students and the Shakespeare audiences who came through these doors. When you walk away along Waterloo Road, listen again to the buses and the trains. They are part of the Old Vic's story too.