Venue: Brighton Open Air Theatre
Address: Bowling Green, Dyke Road Park, Dyke Road, Hove, England
Town: Brighton, GB

Brighton Open Air Theatre, also known as B•O•A•T, is a British theatre built in Dyke Road Park, Brighton, England, which opened on 9 May 2015. It has been paid for not by corporate funding or public grants, but by private donations. The theatre is the legacy of the Brighton showman and construction manager, Adrian Bunting, who died of pancreatic cancer, aged 47, in May 2013. The theatre's radical design, conceived by Bunting, has a long thrust stage, which brings the actors out into the audience space. This has inspired the design of more recent open air theatres, including the Downlands School Theatre in Hassocks and the Thorington Theatre at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. In 2016, the Tatler placed the theatre in its list of the UK's six best outdoor theatres, while the Guardian included it in the 'Top 10 outdoor cinema and theatre events in the UK'. In 2017, the Brighton Open Air Theatre was number three in Curtain Call's list of the world's ten best outdoor theatres, after Shakespeare's Globe and Epidaurus. In 2019, B•O•A•T was number two in the Guardian's list of '10 great UK open-air theatres you can visit on public transport'. Adrian Bunting was a buildings project manager, working on the refurbishment of the Brighton Dome and designing and project managing the construction of hotels in Africa and the Caribbean. He first became involved in theatre in the early 1990s, when he created and presided over Brighton's Zincbar Cabaret. His Guardian obituary recalls, 'The Zincbar, staged every fortnight at the Basement Club in the city, was a gloriously unpredictable crucible into which both gold and rubbish were thrown: comedians, poets and situationists alike. Adrian celebrated all, rousing the audience at the end of each act with: "Wasn't that magnificent?" In 1996, Bunting created the street theatre installation The World's Smallest Theatre, which led to a well publicised battle with Marcel Steiner's Smallest Theatre in the World when both were programmed at the Pleasance