Fears for the Old Vic

While most people have hailed Kevin Spacey as the saviour of the Old Vic, veteran director Alan Strachan, writing in The Independent, is worried that the theatre might be heading in the wrong direction.

That atmosphere of casual but friendly welcome, which used to stamp the Old Vic's character, seems to have changed utterly. Front-of-house and bar staff are now all gussied up in sombre formal black and seem to share a house-style manner of impersonal - not to say chilly - hauteur. Certainly it is one of the factors which fail to bear out the claim - palpably sincere, though it may be - by the company's producer, David Liddiment (an ex-television executive who "discovered" Cloaca) that: "We are trying to live up to the values of this building".