So it was theatre’s most glamorous night of the year last night (apart of course, from the Stage’s own annual New Year’s Party): but how is it that an event that is so well supported by the great and good of the theatre, and has the likes of Kathleen Turner, Christian Slater (suffering a bad hair day that saw him wearing a baseball bat, and perhaps a bad breath day, too, since he was strenuously chewing gum throughout) and even Piers Morgan lining up to give out the awards, registers so little on the national radar?
Of course theatre is a big business (and last year broke its own records, selling over 12.1m tickets in the West End) but a supposedly minority interest, so television coverage of the event is now a thing of the past. But surely there was a golden opportunity to exploit the new technologies instead, and simply web cast it instead?
Instead, it has become an exclusively insiders’ event only, in every sense: the public, who used to be able to buy tickets to attend the awards presentation when they were held at a West End theatre (before the theatre people were bussed off to a private after-ceremony party) are completely excluded. The limited press seating, who were being relied upon presumably to pass the word out to the streets (and national papers they write for), was at the farthest end of the room; since I had not even received a press release from the company handling this year’s event, let alone an invite to it, I ended up having to make a personal appeal to the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, Richard Pulford, who kindly accommodated me at a convivial table of English National Opera personnel.
And colleagues who were in the so-called press room adjoining the ballroom told me that they could neither see nor hear the proceedings properly on the screens installed there; and some were working on the floor since tables hadn’t been supplied.
While it may well be that this is intended to be a private members-only party, the journalists who write about the theatre and the public whose support, after all, ensures its survival need to be accommodated somehow, too, in the thinking.
