Whether doing King Lear with students or performing soliloquies in complete darkness, the great actor was driven by curiosity
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.
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