The Old Vic: The Story of a Great Theatre from Kean to Olivier to Spacey review – how a temperance hall became a theatrical landmark

Women of God and stage greats all have a part to play in Terry Coleman’s captivating history of the robust Old Vic

• • Kate Kellaway - The Observer, Sunday 16 November 2014

People waiting outside the Old Vic theatre for a performance of School for Scandal in 1949. Photograph: William Sumits/The Life Picture Collection/Getty

This splendid history of the Old Vic can be read, from curtain-up, as an extended drama. It will depend on your temperament whether you find it melancholy or invigorating to consider all the great actors – Edmund Kean, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft – who strutted and fretted on its stage. Either way, one character is more robust than any performer: the theatre itself. The Old Vic remains steadfastly there, a short stroll from Waterloo station. Founded in 1818, it used to hold 3,800 people (as opposed to today’s 1,067) and had an extraordinary glass curtain that weighed five tons, which eventually had to be removed for fear it would bring the house down.
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