Shakespeare Magazine 01

Shakespeare city: Bristol
Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s 2000
production of King Lear: Roland Oliver as Lear
(below) and Paul Nicholson as the Fool (below, right).
Amuch-loved, but often-overlooked city
in the South-West of England, Bristol
makes no claims to have any particular
connection with the living, breathing
William Shakespeare. There are a few
passing mentions of the city in Henry IV pts 1 & 2
and Richard II – mostly in connection with troop
movements and ‘the caterpillars of the commonwealth’
who rebel against the monarchy – but it wasn’t a
particularly prominent feature on Shakespeare’s
imaginary map of England.
The playwright’s posthumous presence,
however, looms large. Maybe that’s because,
having passed through Stratford, the river
Avon snakes through the city, runs under
Clifton Suspension Bridge and out to the
Bristol Channel. You might say, in fact, that
the river plugs the city into the Shakespearean
heartland.
A rather less fanciful explanation, perhaps,
is that Bristol has a long and eminent
theatre tradition and, not surprisingly,
productions of Shakespeare’s plays have been
a prominent part of that. Peter O’Toole’s
1955 performance as Hamlet at Bristol Old
Vic is the stuff of legend while the same
theatre’s 1997 production of Macbeth with
Pete Postlethwaite as the eponymous Scottish
king saw the professional stage debut of one
Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Malcolm).
More recently, the city has also gained an
annual Bristol Shakespeare Festival – with
many a production staged outdoors or in
unlikely venues – and the simultaneously
acclaimed and popular Shakespeare at the
Tobacco Factory.
The brainchild of Bristol-based director
Andrew Hilton, the latter began life a few
weeks after the millennium, when it opened
with King Lear. On the face of it, it was
absurdly ambitious: a full-cast production of
the bleakest tragedy staged in a rough-andready
space on the first floor of a stripped-out
factory building in what was then a fairly
rundown part of south Bristol.
On press night, not more than a dozen
people showed up. Only two of us were
journalists. Of the rest, at least three or more
members of the audience appeared to have
wandered into the place by accident and had
only stayed because it was marginally warmer
than the street outside. We spread ourselves
out in the auditorium in a desperate attempt
SHAKESPEARE magazine 23