The Royal Festival Hall is about to be re-born after a two-year closure, and seeing it unveiled to the press yesterday, it certainly does have a cleaner, fresher, brighter look – though it will, of course, take a while for it to start feeling “lived in” again. Audiences, of course, will provide their own energy, and so will the resident artists: as Vladimir Jurowski of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment commented in a break from rehearsals at the press conference yesterday, “It will take us up to two years to learn how to operate in it – the hall has to get used to the musicians and the musicians to the hall”.
Audiences and artists alike have been having to embark on those learning curves all over London in the past few years: reacquainting ourselves with places that are familiar yet different. The joy of the Festival Hall refurb is that the physical space of the auditorium is pretty much the same; but while a lot of the work is behind-the-scenes, much of it, too, was in opening up the front-of-house areas, with some 35% more public space opened up by “clearing the clutter” that had accrued in every nook and cranny of the venue as offices were added over the years. These are now in an out-house, next to the railway arches, leaving the hall and foyers entirely for performance and the public.
Originally budgeted at £91m, the costs have now reached $111m, and are expected to rise to $115m – some of it reclaimed from the retail rentals that the site now offers to restaurants (the first part of the project to re-open as it did last year) and shops. London is, of course, in the grip of an amazing regeneration of its leading public art venues that has already seen the refurbishments of the Royal Albert Hall (£70m), Royal Opera House (£78m), London Coliseum (£41m), Royal Court (£26m), Almeida (£4.3m), Hackney Empire (£17m), Young Vic (£12.5m) and the foyer and public areas for the Barbican Centre (£14m) and Lyric Hammersmith (£2.6m); as well as the completely new builds for Hampstead Theatre (£15.7m) and the Unicorn (£12.6m). Outside of London, too, there has been lots of work, including the mammoth project to renew the RSC’s base at Stratford-upon-Avon (£100m, with £6m spent on the temporary installation of the Courtyard Theatre that the company is occupying while the main house is shut).
These, of course, are all public-private partnerships, with lottery, Arts Council and local government funding matched by private sector and corporate donation – it was amazing to hear that Vivien Duffield alone put £5m into the Festival Hall kitty. But she’s not the only benefactor to London’s arts venues, and some refurbishment projects have been done with private money only, such as Cameron Mackintosh’s ongoing upgrades to his own venues that have included a £7m spend on the Prince of Wales and a £1.7m refurb of the Novello. A scheme to re-do the Queen’s and Gielgud (and add the Sondheim studio above the Queen’s), originally budgeted at £20m, seems to be on hold; part of the problem, no doubt, is that the Queen’s now has Les Miserables in residence, so the work can’t be started till that departs, but also, when I last spoke to Cameron about this, he told me that he’d already spent more than he’d anticipated. Perhaps the idea to name a theatre in Sondheim’s honour – still, bizarrely, not done in his hometown, even though they have theatres named there for dead white male theatre critics and even a living theatre producer (Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organisation) – should be moved to one of Cameron’s other theatres, such as the Queen’s.
Elsewhere, however, the West End significantly lags behind the public sector in bringing its buildings into the 20th century, let alone the 21st. The cry for public funding may be hard to justify for them, especially when so much of it is now going to be diverted to funding the Olympics already. But I recently came across an interview with the Old Vic’s Sally Greene that appeared in the Daily Mail online last year which suggested a personal approach to finance that would mean that public funding is probably unnecessary there. She tells us she makes frequent trips to New York, “looking for new productions or ideas. I used to travel club class, but now it’s first class. On one of these trips, we take new writers to produce work off Broadway. I spend about £38,000 a year on fares.” And when she gets there, she tells us her favourite hotel is the Four Seasons, where she tells us, “The room rates are from $3,700 (£2,000) a night for a small one, and their penthouse suite is $15,000 a night.” Meanwhile, for trips to Paris – where she always stays at the Cotes near the Champs Elyees, where “my room number is almost always 110, with a balcony overlooking a courtyard”, she gets there by Eurostar: “Premium First, which is wonderful because there are often few people in the carriage.”
Of course a producer’s creature comforts are none of our business; but our comfort as an audience at one of their theatres is, and as long as money is being spent so freely like that, why isn’t it also being spent on the venues, too?
