Spacey to the rescue

First, Emma Cons, a ferocious advocate of temperance, cleaned up the theatre's act in 1880 and encouraged lectures and morally improving shows. Later, Lilian Bayliss, one of the great architects of our culture, produced a relentless menu of Shakespeare and classics, spawning along the way the Sadler's Wells theatre, the Royal Ballet, and keeping alive the dream of a National Theatre.

This dream came yet closer to fruition under the regime of Tyrone Guthrie. Throughout the Thirties, in exile during the Forties (in keeping with its role as a mirror to the nation, the Old Vic took a fearful battering from the Germans), and again during the Fifties the theatres showcased a steady stream of some of the best acting ever seen in the world. Ever. This was the age that misty-eyed theatricoes always recall, when they talk of paying sixpence to sit in the gods and hear Olivier roar or Gielgud sing.

These two, together with Ashcroft, Laughton, Richardson, Redgrave, Guinness and many others competed with themselves and each other to redefine what acting is. Their versespeaking caressed its walls, their intelligence and wit danced within its space. Time was stopped, spread out and rearranged night after night.

The dream of a National Theatre became a reality in the Sixties, when a ferocious company of younger bucks under the tutelage of Olivier roared in. Peter O'Toole, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon played a wildly eclectic programme of safe and mad, designed for them by Kenneth Tynan. This was effectively the theatre's last era of uninterrupted glory.

Once Denys Lasdun's concrete symphony had opened on the South Bank down the road, and the NT company wandered away, the Old Vic lost a little of its reason for being. It has always looked a little sad and deserted ever since. It's most natural role was a central one, and like a rumbustious old Lear, it's never been that happy on the periphery.

The Prospect Theatre Company was there for a while; the insanely generous Mirvish family bought it in 1982 and poured money in. They bankrolled the Jonathan Miller years, which produced a body of work that defined its period - the late Eighties - expressionist, European and startlingly designed. They also bankrolled one final project beyond which there could be no more bankrolling. Peter Hall's all-too-brief year there in 1997 produced a remarkable repertoire of six classic plays with a standing company, and six new plays produced by myself.

I found it an intimidating theatre to work in. Its sheer size and its public dimension make it very unforgiving to televisual mumbling. But equally, its precise focus demands truth and honesty and can be cruel to anything vague or rhetorical.

There is also a ludicrous degree of expectation around the building, a blinding glare of history, which can make directors and actors freeze like rabbits before the critics shoot them. But above all, it is a privilege.

Peter Hall's was a madly ambitious experiment, and briefly threw up the ghost of an old sort of theatre - generous, communal, rigorous and warm. But it was sadly only a ghost, and a new England was unable to support it.

Since then, under the new management, there have been hits and misses, with large gaps in between. The highs have been great - The Iceman Cometh with Kevin Spacey; Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell; The Island; The Car Man and Derek Jacobi in The Tempest, which graces the stage now. The lows have been not so great: an Antigone which didn't fare so well, and a cheerfully disastrous Troilus and Cressida all of my own making.

What is needed now is a policy pitched somewhere on the wafer-thin line between sufficient boldness and sufficient accessibility, and above and beyond all else, regular production. The Old Vic is one of those rare rooms that holds the soul of the nation in its walls. It has been too quiet of late. If Mr Spacey can help it to speak up a little, and if the plays can start to match the parties, then we will all be the better for it.

Dominic Drumgoole is artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company.