Once again Maureen Lipman – who a few months ago was publicly claiming that seats for her current vehicle Glorious! were going unsold because ticket agencies were misleadingly representing it as sold out when what it was only their own allocations that had gone – has returned to the theme in her column in today’s Guardian. “I’ve had friends telling me they couldn’t get into our show when the house was only three-quarters full.” That’s because, she says, “the major ticket agencies allocate a few seats to each subsidiary agency, so when they tell you ‘there are no seats available for Glorious or the Blue Man Group, but we do have seats for Phantom of the Opera or Stomp, they are, at best, distorting the truth.”
She adds that, “some of the ticket agencies are owned by the theatre owners themselves, which in itself is worth investigating, perhaps (said she, looking nervously over one shoulder)”. It’s an interesting fact, of course, that the Duchess – home to Glorious! – is one of the new stable of four Nimax-owned theatres, whose co-owner Nica Burns I recently heard say that couldn’t afford to implement their own ticketing system, so they had continued with the existing arrangements the theatre had when it was still part of the Really Useful Theatres of outsourcing the ticketing functions to See Tickets, the agency owned by the Really Useful Group that Lipman was alluding to. Intriguingly, looking up the show right now online, I cannot find tickets listed for performances beyond tonight (and even that is off-sale), though the show is officially booking to April 22 (click through to performances in April, and it returns a message: sorry, your search found no matches in our database). Perhaps Lipman has a point.
She also laments the state of the theatres themselves: “The buildings are archaic, the seats maim you, the toilets are vintage and few (a throwback to Edwardian times, when women didn’t have bladders). As for the backstage areas – well, there are very few open days in London theatres, you’ll notice.”
While she gives credit where its due – “At least Cameron Mackintosh puts as much money back as a theatre owner as he puts in as a producer, and his recent renovations are monuments for future theatre-goers pleasure” – but says, “For some of the others, it’s just bricks and mortar on the outside, whatever tosh it takes to keep it open on the inside, and slap the inflation on the programmes and ice-cream bills”.
