Old Vic Reverts to Receiving House???

With Robert Altman’s star-studded but critically panned UK premiere production of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues now confirmed to close a week early (See Today’s News), it’s looking almost certain that the Old Vic will go dark for what could be a substantial stretch of time this summer (See The Goss, 29 Mar 2006). The Miller play will now finish on 15 April 2006 and – despite talk over the past seven months about numerous possibilities being juggled for the empty summer slot - no further productions have been announced until September, when Howard Davies’ revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Old Vic artistic director Kevin Spacey (who won a clutch of awards in Davies’ 1998 staging of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh) is due to open (although final dates have still not been confirmed and booking has not yet opened). One rumour in recent weeks was that Michael Rudman’s Martin Shaw-led revival of A Man for All Seasons, which finished its limited season at the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket this past weekend, might transfer across the river to the Old Vic for another limited engagement, though perhaps with a new cast. Whether or not that comes to pass, it does seem that the Old Vic management has been in talks with various parties about bringing outside productions in – turning the venue back into a receiving house, a tag it fought hard to shake off after Spacey was appointed artistic director in February 2003 (See News, 5 Feb 2003).

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