Bristol calling: Don't call us provincial

There's more to theatre outside London than Stratford-upon-Avon. David Farr and Simon Reade, the Bristol Old Vic's new artistic directors, are fed up with the focus always being on the capital

Regional rep is dead. Provincial theatre is defunct. It exists no more. But hang on: haven't we just been appointed the new artistic directors of the Bristol Old Vic? Indeed we have, and we don't, in those two opening statements, mean to imply that all the theatres outside London have had the plug pulled. Quite the opposite. At a time when the best theatre in Britain is seen one week in Sheffield, the next in Hammersmith, then in Leeds, Stratford, Edinburgh, Dalston, and soon Bristol, we call for a radical redefinition of British theatre.

Over the last 10 years the UK's diverse cities have been revitalised. And those cities' theatres, concert halls, museums and galleries are leading a British cultural renaissance. Take theatre. Across the country, newly aspirant theatres are mounting productions of excellence. Yet if these theatres are outside London, they are still described as "regional reps", or as "provincial". The implication is that they are acultural hangover from the 1950s, with stale Noël Coward or a limp bedroom farce most likely to feature on the playbill.

The situation is absurd. Why should the Bristol Old Vic have more in common with the Liverpool Everyman than with the Young Vic? It is still more absurd that the work of these theatres is only legitimised by a London transfer. This two-tier arrangement – London and everywhere else – is the legacy of chronic under-funding outside London, combined with a focus of per-capita wealth on the capital. Itwould be unthinkable in Europe, where it is regarded as perfectly natural that Pina Bausch has created the most important dance-theatre in Europe in Wuppertal, the German equivalent of Wolverhampton, and where all major cities have national state theatres capable of producing work of international quality. But here the situation has, like so much else, been quietly accepted.

Now, though, for the first time in 20-odd years, funding has saved theatres from crisis and lured a new generation of artists to work in them. Five years ago, we would never have dreamt of runningthe Bristol Old Vic. It was under-funded and artistically underachieving, one of many theatres where putting on plays took second place to mere survival.

But there has been a shift in attitudes, manifest in the temperament of a host of new artistic directors, led by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and Michael Boyd at the RSC. This diverse group bears no relation to the caricature of the big-bellied, antagonistic, tub-thumping legends of the Sixties and Seventies, who seemed to defy financial rationale in the name of Politics and Art. Hytner, Boyd and the rest of us are part of the generation brought up under Thatcher – wecan't help but be financially savvy. Yet we also abhorthe cultural philistinism of Thatcherite philosophy. The result of this paradox istheatrically explosive.Financially astute artists are producing high-quality work, eradicating the complacency and inertia engendered by the past couple of decades.

We arrive at a time when attempts in the Eighties and Nineties to run theatres like businesses can be seen to have missed the point. Non-artistic administrators were parachuted in to trouble-shoot. Marketing departments were inflated, while the number of performers and the variety of productions on stage was reduced. By the end of the 1990s, British theatre was in need of a creative adrenalin shot and a heavy dose of arts council recovery funding. It was as if people had forgotten why theatres exist: to put on plays. Theatre is a quixotic art form, not a factory. And a marketing campaign can only ever be as good as what it's flogging. Too often in the theatres of the past decade, a vast array of whips was being used to flog a dead horse.

Pursuit of box office alone brings diminishing returns – financial and creative. Without artistic daring, audiences become reluctant to engage with theatre. Rejecting Little England, we new artistic directors are inspired by the European repertoire. Manchester's Royal Exchange recently scored a massive hit with The Marriage of Figaro, Chichester will soon stage Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise and the Bristol Old Vic will produce Calderon's Life's a Dream this autumn. The perennial quest for new, young audiences will not succeed through patronising programming and accessibility strategies, but by this kind of ambitious, unapologetically intellectual and entertaining theatre – theatre that is genuinely challenging. Aiming to please all pleases no one. Instead, we will stamp an individual character on a theatre and invite stimulated audiences to join us there.

We're not overwhelmed by the enormity of the buildings or the deficits. The impossible is a fabulous challenge. We resist institutionalisation and aim to be as spontaneous as the Battersea Arts Centre, the Arcola in Dalston, the Tobacco Factory in Bristol. Look at the leap of faith Chichester is taking by operating under a triumvirate of artistic directors – Martin Duncan, Ruth Mackenzie and Steven Pimlott. It's never been tried before. It might succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.

We aim for an individual spirit for each theatre, defined by the vision of its artistic directors. Critics increasingly recognise this and often travel beyond London in order to report fully on the cultural change throughout Britain. Audiences recognise it, too, and take great civic pride in their theatres.

Each place has its own character. What you get in one city, you won't get anywhere else.So it is plain daft to liken, say, Plymouth to Liverpool, or Birmingham to Bristol, Chichester to Leeds. The demographics are not alike. The artistic policies differ enormously. Yet funding schemes have, in recent years, misguidedly forced relationships between theatres out of short-term economic necessity. Some of these partnerships have resulted in rootless, homogenised fare. Theatres will continue to collaborate as appropriate. But where spaces are incompatible, or artistic polices are at odds, or social contrast is too great, a co-production would be an arbitrary, fruitless exercise.

So here are three demands we make of contemporary British theatre:

1) Let's get rid of the misleading and patronising terms "provincial theatre" and "regional rep". Let's highlight the silliness of commentators such as The Guardian writer who recently patted the RSC on the head for its production of Coriolanus because it showed "signs that regional theatre is still flourishing". Such bias is absurd and must be eradicated from the attitude and language of all funding bodies, theatres and journalists.

2) The Olivier Awards must be open to theatres throughout the country. Any award for which the Almeida, Sheffield Crucible, Live Theatre Newcastle, West Yorkshire Playhouse and others are not eligible unless they have a show in the West End is a hollow compliment. If the vested interests that control the awards system resist, let's set up genuinely national awards.

3) Let's recognise and acknowledge an unlimited, loose network of national, state-subsidised theatres – as in Europe, where such theatres are found in Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt as well as in Berlin; Strasbourg and Lille as well as Paris; Barcelona as well as Madrid; Thessalonica as well as Athens, and so on.

Let's consign the regional rep to the evolutionary history of British theatre. In the 21st century, let's at long last join the growing movement towards European national state theatres. Greetings from the Bristol Old Vic: the national state theatre of Bristol.