There's life in the Old Vic yet

It's been three and a half years since the cash-strapped Old Vic escaped the clutches of lap-dancing entrepreneurs and property developers, and was saved for London as a theatre. Yet only now does it gain its first artistic director - Matthew Warchus, the amiable, soft-spoken Renaissance man, as well known for his work in opera as theatre; the original director of Yasmina Reza's highly commercial Art, whose under-rated movie debut, an adaptation of Sam Shepard's Simpatico, proved his subtle touch on film too.

Unlike other youngish, talented British directors who dominated the London theatre during the mid-Nineties, Warchus has not been seduced by big-movie bucks. Instead, he's been successfully wooed by the saviours of the Old Vic, principal among them former actress-turnedtheatrical fundraiser Sally Greene and former Royal Court directorturned-Hollywood darling Stephen Daldry, the founders in 1998 of the Old Vic Theatre Trust with businessman Alex Bernstein.

Warchus's tenure began with the new year, to the surprise of many in the theatre world who believed him frontrunner in the race to take over artistic direction at the Almeida in Islington. Though his plans are still semi-formed, and his commitments elsewhere are piling up (he's scheduled to direct A Winter's Tale for the RSC at the Roundhouse in March, for example), Warchus, it is hoped, is just the man to turn around what has come to be seen as an artistically bankrupt venue.

The past three years have been tough at the Old Vic, admits Greene. When the theatre's former owners, Canadians David and Ed Mirvish, graciously agreed to sell the Vic for half its original asking price in 1998, she, Daldry and Bernstein were widely heralded as conservators and innovators, both saving a piece of prime theatrical heritage and beginning a bright new chapter in the theatre's chequered 180-year history. At first, the Vic's function was purely passive, a stage for hire while its ghastly financial situation was stabilised but in August 2000 a production company, Old Vic Productions, was finally launched, controlled by a glittering board of theatrical A-listers, including Judi Dench, Jeremy Irons, Richard Eyre, Daldry and the Vic's staunchest supporter, Kevin Spacey.

The promises made then have yet to be fulfilled, however. Though Old Vic Productions was never meant merely to support "product" at the Vic, but to invest in shows throughout London (in effect, it was a rebranding of Criterion Productions, Greene's original producing company) it seemed only to neglect its home, and the Vic began to slide into serious artistic malaise.

Judgments were sometimes bad. With a terrible Antigone, a moderately successful first look at Conor McPherson's A Dublin Carol (and that only in preview before its real premiere at the Royal Court) and the "rickety, farcical" (cf. Nicholas de Jongh) return of Joan Collins to the London stage in the Ray Cooney-produced Over the Moon late last year, it seemed that the poor Old Vic was gaining a new reputation not for excitement and innovation in an upcoming area of London, but for second-rate offerings and missed opportunities. Last spring, the theatre was completely dark, a rumoured adaptation of Alan Clark's Diaries having apparently fallen through, and nothing else scheduled to take its place.

The problem was mostly financial - but also, says Greene, geographical. The Vic cost the Trust £3.5 million, of Arts

which £1.5 million was already in the kitty in 1998. The various grandees of British theatre - and Kevin Spacey, who flies to London specially for board meetings and calls Greene every fortnight for an update on fundraising progress - concentrated on raising the remaining £2 million, keeping the building open, and maintaining an ongoing restoration project. In the process, artistic policy didn't get enough of a look-in. As both a receiving house and an originator of new shows, the Vic was in serious need of direction. This is what Warchus has been hired to put right. Meanwhile, although the trust still owes £300,000 and the roof still leaks (applications to the Arts Council lottery fund to mend it have so far been turned down), the theatre itself is in the black, revenue-wise - - an enormous achievement given the economic climate and the hardships of 2001.

Greene claims, in addition, that some "big" British actors simply don't want to perform in The Cut, and in the Vic. "One thing I've learned over the past few years," she says, "is that this is a difficult theatre, and people are rather up and down about it. It's as though it's on the wrong side of the tracks. I hit this problem last year, when a leading, classically trained actor, dropped out of a production because he didn't like the theatre."

Unlike the Americans, who value the Vic as the playhouse where Olivier, Gielgud and Ashcroft all honed their art, the British are surprisingly lacking in sentimental attachment.