The winter blues….

In the suddenly topsy-turvy world of the West End, where musicals currently outnumber plays at least two to one, the few plays to have opened this autumn have taken a further knock today with the simultaneous posting of early closing notices for two of them: Bent will bow out from the Trafalgar Studios on December 9 (after a 12-week run), some weeks short of the original closing date of January 13; and Summer and Smoke will close at the Apollo on November 25, far ahead of the original closing date of February 7, 2007.

Of course, shows may succeed for many reasons but fail, primarily, for one: audiences simply don’t come, at least in sufficient numbers, to cover the costs. In both cases, the producers have put a brave face on things: Bent, they say in their closing notice, “continues to receive great audience response and standing ovations”, while Kim Poster, producer of Summer and Smoke, draws attention to the “very positive reviews” it had.

But Bent draws attention to another, potentially even more disastrous factor in its closure: “in the competitive West End climate, which is offering a huge range of new musicals combined with the run up to Christmas”, they have made the decision to make way for a new production. Musicals, in other words, haven’t just edged plays out of getting into the theatres in the first place, but are edging the plays that actually have got there out there, too.

We’ve been seeing a seismic change in the landscape of the West End this year: as with global warming, where the signs have been there for years but have only lately been adopted as fact, perhaps we can finally accept that we’ve followed the Broadway path all too clearly. The driving force of the West End, as on Broadway, is now the musical; and as West End ticket prices for musicals have now not only matched those for Broadway but actually eclipsed them (with the £60 and £59.50 top price of Porgy and Bess and Dirty Dancing respectively), that all-too-tempting economic clock cannot be easily turned back.

As long as there’s the National, Royal Court, Almeida, Donmar and so on, of course, serious theatregoers are still being (well) catered for in London; but the best we can now hope for in the West End is event-theatre plays, like yesterday’s announcement of the Daniel Ratcliffe revival of Equus, or transfers from the subsidised sector, like Rock ‘n’ Roll, Frost/Nixon or the belated arrival, at last, of The History Boys.