Wild Oats, Bristol Old Vic, review At the Bristol Old Vic, a bravura case of back to the future. After an 18-month, £12 million refurbishment, the country's oldest working theatre - and before Tom Morris became artistic director in 2009, one of the most troubled in the land - has flung open its doors to reveal a plush auditorium that restores the intimacy and the vibrancy of the original Georgian template. The only example left of its kind - all the others burned down - the theatre achieved a proximity between audience and actors when it was built in 1766 that has been ruinously tampered with over the centuries. As much as you marvel at the technical wizardry of this renovation and rejoice as you do at the first-class comfort of the seats, it's the geometry unveiled this week that makes all the difference. The stage now extends through the proscenium arch. The stalls, for so long a dismal let-down, have been raised. All the sight-lines, even in the gallery, are good. At a stroke, the "spatial relationship" between punter and player has been gloriously re-forged. I think you could say that the overriding emotion experienced while watching Mark Rosenblatt's revival of John O'Keefe's Wild Oats (1791), which launches the "new" Old Vic, is therefore one of happy relief. Common sense and good taste have prevailed. The proof of the pudding will come at many other sittings; and as everyone gets used to the improved environment, I suspect that the ambience will become more relaxed and conducive to great nights out. It's a canny choice, all the same, to give us a comedy that hails from the era of the Old Vic's infancy, one that larks around inventively with the business of acting and which, in its self-aware games of assumed and mistaken identity, has the flavour of an early, prescient experiment in postmodernism. The premise is simple: the richly worded action centres on incorrigible thespian and compulsive Shakespeare-quoter Jack Rover, an orphan who turns out to be the consequence of wild oat-sowing years earlier by Sir George Thunder, now an irascible old sea dog. What follows, though, after Thunder arrives at the Hampshire home of his niece, Lady Amaranth - who has become a pious and priggish Quaker - entails escalating silliness. The urge to adopt a disguise spreads like a rash. At one point Thunder's errant, asinine younger son Harry - who fawningly follows Jack - persuades the latter that his dad is actually an actor himself who goes by the name of Abrawang. The evening runs dangerously close to becoming a hard to follow in-joke - and I'm not sure Rosenblatt's decision to give an added Forties rep spin to the arch, fleet-footed proceedings helps the internal logic of the thing. But there's still a warmth and zest to the production that encourages belly laughs even as your head struggles to play catch-up. Fine performances abound - hats off to Jo Herbert as the ludicrously earnest Amaranth, Hugh Skinner as the wide-eyed greenhorn Harry, and Sam Alexander as the open-hearted but oddly hollowed-out hero Jack. On this occasion, though, the praise owed to the show is rightly upstaged by the wonder induced by its surroundings.