The Play’s the thing…. but what’s the play?

The Play’s the Thing — the Channel 4 commissioned project that is following the progress of a new play by an unknown writer being selected for production and leading to its opening in the West End — broadcast its first episode last night, and the play itself begins previews at the New Ambassadors Theatre tomorrow night (14 June). However, the title of the winning play and the identity of its author are still under wraps — and curiously, will remain so officially until next Monday, when the next episode of the TV series broadcasts it and there is an accompanying official release. Yet anyone who buys a ticket for a performance this week will, of necessity, find out who the winner is, since that is the play that are actually witnessing. And the internet chatboards will no doubt resound to the information, since there’s nothing that the theatre websites and the people who visit them like better than to be the first with the news, whether its officially released or not.

The PRs for the show realise they are powerless to stop this, but merely say they hope that the press respect the spirit of the competition. Yet to whose benefit, precisely? Obviously very many more people may be following the TV series than will actually be likely to see the play in the theatre, and it would be good to retain the suspense for them. But once a play begins previews, it is surely impossible to keep a lid on this kind of information. Nowadays there are no limits to the amount of opinion and gossip traded online — and perhaps it would be been wiser to recognise this, and have scheduled the previews to begin to actually coincide with the TV broadcast of the relevant episode, so that there was a real and not manufactured suspense to the outcome.

As it is, the theatre producers are also, of course, giving themselves a marketing nightmare: with no title or subject matter to promote — or even, until a few weeks ago and a rehearsal picture appeared in the Observer, a cast to announce — they are asking tickets to be bought entirely ‘blind’. Some may want the thrill of being in at the beginning of something unknown — but you can be sure they won’t keep the secret for long.

The timetable for the public release of the information, meanwhile, is being entirely driven by the imperatives of the TV company, not the reality of theatrical consumption. Nor can any of us resist the temptation to speculate on the outcome: having seen the first episode, I’d put my money on the Manchester supermarket shelf-stacker turned playwright, Steve Gardner, and his play Father’s Day — about which the panel variously enthused that it “smacks of the work of a real playwright…. you can’t teach it. Real playwrights are born not made” (Mel Kenyon) and that it was “so truthful” (Sonia Friedman).