Theatre Fans and Theatre Buildings; or "This Beloved Theatre of Ours"

I first became interested in the idea that theatres could act as fan objects back in 2016, when I began working on a British Academy-funded research project studying how audiences’ engagements have evolved over time with a specific theatrical producing house. This was Bristol Old Vic in the UK, which at that time was busy celebrating its 250th birthday as ‘the longest continuously running theatre in the English speaking world’. One strand of this project involved conducting empirical research with some of Bristol Old Vic’s most committed audiences: the members of Bristol Old Vic Theatre Club (BOVTC), which was launched in the 1940s as an audience-run organisation led by a group of enthusiasts to raise money for the theatre and to otherwise support its activities. I began to realise that while BOVTC does not call itself a ‘fan club’, reframing the investments of its members in Fan Studies terms could potentially produce valuable perspectives on the relationship between theatre and fandom. This article explores how, for Bristol Old Vic’s most intensely engaged audience members, their love of the theatre blurs together enjoyment of the organisation’s production work with an enduring attachment to the material building that houses it. Through discursive analysis of archival materials, it shows that this affective blurring was central to the theatre’s historical identity during the 1940s rebranding, when Bristol’s Theatre Royal became the first venue ever to be funded by the Arts Council and was subsequently reimagined as a regional outpost of London’s Old Vic. When it comes to theatre fandom, the love of theatre as performance is often hard to separate from the love of theatre as place.