Tim West was the ultimate theatre-lover. I had the great good fortune to spend a decade as artistic director of his favourite theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and that enabled me to get to know this giant of British theatre from a slightly unusual point of view.
Tim had grown up in Bristol, watching his father, Lockwood West, performing with the Rapier Players at the Little theatre, now part of the Beacon concert venue. When I met Tim and Pru [his wife, Prunella Scales] to talk about the refurbishment of the Bristol Old Vic, he took me on a tour of the city, unravelling the architectural monstrosities of the 1960s and 70s and revealing the city as it was when he had wandered it as a child in the 1930s. He took me through the old Horsefair towards the Empire theatre in the Old Market (forbidden territory for young Tim) and back through Victoria Street to the Old Vic where he had always longed to perform, where he had served as a board member and leading actor in the 1980s, and where he finally agreed to return to perform King Lear for the theatre’s 250th birthday in 2016. At every step of the walk, enthusiasm bubbled from him like a fountain.
The concept for the production of King Lear was unusual. The play depicts a world divided between young and old. Aiming to support the creative ambitions of the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, we had agreed to cast three great actors in the roles of Lear, Gloucester and the Fool, and to supply all other parts from the graduating year of actors. Alongside Stephanie Cole as a melancholy Fool and David Hargreaves as a profoundly tragic Gloucester, Tim leapt at the chance to play Lear for the fourth time in his life, raggedly keen to share the stage and his experience with actors on the threshold of their professional careers.
The generational divide was truly poignant, the graduating actors had an experience they are probably talking about even as you read this, and Tim’s Lear was magical, heartbreaking and weirdly powerful. Tim’s favourite night was the performance on 24 June, when the fallout from the Brexit referendum produced shouts of dismay at Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom and roars of agreement with the Fool’s prophecy: “Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion.”
Tim loved theatre not just because of what it was, but because he believed in its connection with the world he saw and lived in. For him it was part of a political and creative system through which a society might understand itself and evolve. Whenever he was asked to stand up for theatre and its value, he would do so – not because it was reassuring or in any sense old-fashioned, but because he believed to the soles of his shoes that it could make the world a better place.
Because Tim was often cast as lawyers, doctors, politicians or figures of the establishment, you might be forgiven for thinking he was like that himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. His dry wit and disruptive twinkle were legendary among colleagues. I’d first met him a decade before Bristol when I was working at the Battersea Arts Centre, which happened to be his local theatre in south-west London. As soon as he heard that we were preparing an experimental season to be performed in complete darkness, Tim conspired with director Steve Unwin to be part of it.
He performed a sequence of Shakespearean soliloquies in order to discover what pictures he could paint in the minds of an audience who could not see him. Curiosity and experiment were as much a part of Tim’s toolkit as an actor as the golden vocal technique for which his millions of fans will rightly remember and celebrate him. When you were in his company, you never quite knew what would happen next. And that, above all, is what we will miss.