New plays in the Subsidised vs Commercial Sectors

Two stories in the Evening Standard today highlight the discrepancies and challenges of putting a new play on in the West End versus the subsidised sector. On the one hand, it is reported that a new play – as yet even untitled and its subject matter entirely unknown to all but its cast and director – that opens in less than a month’s time at the National Theatre is already a complete sell-out. Over 16,000 tickets have been sold to what’s being only billed as “A New Play by Mike Leigh”, but the expectation and following that Leigh now has, in the wake of such Oscar-nominated films as Vera Drake and Life is Sweet, is sufficient to pre-sell it’s Cottesloe run, even though Leigh hasn’t actually had a major new theatrical success since Goosepimples transferred from Hampstead Theatre to the Garrick in 1981. (His next two original plays, Smelling a Rat at Hampstead in 1989 and It’s a Great Big Shame at Stratford East in 1993 didn’t have a life beyond their original runs there).

On the other hand, actor-turned-playwright Nick Moran, whose first play Telstar is now running at the New Ambassadors, reports how difficult it is proving to attract audiences to the play, despite receiving (mostly) favourable reviews. Asked after a charity gala last week if he was going to write another play, he reports that he replied no – and when asked why not, answered: “Because it’s been a f*ing nightmare”.

His amplifies the situation thus: “Getting a new play on in the West End and, more to the point, trying to keep it there, is a nightmare. Or perhaps more like an impossible computer game: virtual producer.” After an eight-year journey to bring the story of the late record producer Joe Meek to the stage, it finally reached the New Ambassadors in June. “And we got some great reviews – not all, of course, but a couple of definite raves – and the audiences seem to enjoy it: nine weeks into our 12-week run, we still get standing ovations.”

But there are lots of strikes against it ever getting as far as it has: “It was hard enough raising the money to get the play into a West End theatre, following our regional tour. We had Con O’Neill, who is the youngest-ever Olivier Award-winner and, everyone agrees, outstanding in the role of Meek, but not a Hollywood star name; no one knew the play, and there were no songs in it.” It was eventually backed by a football club chairman, Simon Jordan of Crystal Palace, who “took the leap of faith and helped us to make it happen.”

But now that it is there, he’s finding a perennial truth: that the commercial theatre lives – and dies – by its box office. “Here’s the source of my frustration,” he writes: “To be blunt, it’s ticket sales. It’s getting the audience in. It’s getting to a potential audience. It’s telling them we’re here and we’ve got something they might like… Getting the hip crowd into the West End to see a new play is difficult. And I have tried.”

While Moran is acting as his own town crier for the piece in his Standard feature, it’s true that – without a USP for his show, whether it be a “name” actor or something else – there simply isn’t a West End audience anymore, in the way that there is a National, Donmar, Almeida or Royal Court audience who will buy those trusted ‘brands’, sight (and in the case of the National, even title) unseen, to pay the kind of prices that it demands. Moran is discovering the hard way that it’s no longer good enough, alas, to write a good play, and even not good enough to get good reviews for it; the West End, like Broadway, is more to do with an “event” before it will be supported.