Yesterday The Stage reported from the Performing Theatres Conference that Chichester’s Jonathan Church had said that audience comfort was being put ahead of facilities for backstage staff and actors. “In the last ten years, a lot of money has been spent on theatres making their customer care better - we’ve got glitzy bars and fantastic box office systems,” he is quoted as saying. “We’ve become complex, big businesses, running catering companies and doing international touring - yet the people who actually make the work are paid badly, housed badly and work in poor conditions. How many actors do we ask to work in ludicrous environments? To rehearse in sports halls that are too dusty? It seems worse because they’re working in buildings that have had millions spent on their refurbishment yet the conditions for the actors or technical people haven’t progressed in 40 years.”.
He, of course, is speaking from the apparent luxury of a subsidised infrastructure, one that has benefited from the lottery windfall that has enabled major capital improvements to a lot of theatres up and down the land. Today will in fact see the launch of a campaign to refurbish the Bristol Old Vic, clearly a case, if proof be needed, of the rashness of the Board’s decision to close the theatre so summarily, since the refurbishment plans they gave as the reason for it were clearly not very far advanced. Attached to an invitation to the launch, being held at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane this morning, was a note: “Quite simply if we don’t raise the final amount of money needed to refurbish, the oldest continuously working theatre in the country will shut for good and a valuable resource for the region will disappear.”
The irony that this event is being held at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – one of the supposed jewels in the West End crown – is that its one of the most historic theatres in London, too, and could do with a major refurbishment itself. Attending the premiere of The Lord of the Rings there last night, on an alternately barmy and stormy night, the humidity outside was exceeded only by the stifling heat inside.
It’s sadly an annual complaint in the West End – I blogged about it last July and said, echoing Church’s sentiments, “The unwary may find themselves trapped in a kind of theatrical hell. And if it’s bad for us, spare a thought, too, for the actors, who are performing under heavy lights and heavier costumes.” The Evening Standard, who also wage an annual war against the conditions on the tube, sent their thermometers into London theatres to measure the heat inside them, and headlined it, “We’re all sweltering, and it’s not just Jeffrey Bernard feeling unwell….” Readings were duly taken at the Garrick, home of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, where they found an actual temperature of 35.5C (87F), which converts to an “experienced apparent temperature” (combining temperature and humidity readings) of 39.53C (103F).
When I interviewed Andrew Lloyd Webber earlier this year about the lack of air-conditioning at places like Drury Lane, he told me that the fact that it was a listed building meant it would cost £20million to put in an air-conditioning plant, whereas without listing he could achieve it for £1million. While another theatrical insider I put this to asked me politely if he said this before or after lunch, it is unquestionably a massive task to upgrade big old sites like this, listing or not. But when customers are, in the case of Lord of the Rings, being asked to pay up to £60 a ticket, they deserve at the very least not to have sit in huge discomfort fanning themselves feebly with their theatre programmes. The only relief last night was when a massive wind effect engulfed the auditorium. More, please!
The alternative may be to simply shut down the West End for the summer. If the theatres cannot be upgraded, let the theatres that don’t have air conditioning simply shut down operations from June to September. The prospect of losing a quarter of their annual revenue might, in fact, find them realising that its affordable to install some kind of air conditioning after all.
Just as, at the Old Vic, it might be time to fix the seats before the expect people to sit on them. They may, according to some of my colleagues’ notices, be staging a creaky old play in Gaslight, but that’s no reason for the seats to groan even more, unless they’re doing so in sympathy. As Kate Bassett commented in the Independent on Sunday, “It’s hard to say which is creakier: the Old Vic’s rickety seating (which artistic director Kevin Spacey should oil immediately) or the rusty vintage play up on stage.” In The Observer, the diary column reported that at Gaslight, “many lines were rendered inaudible by the squeaking of the ancient seats in the stalls. And it is not just that they squeak. Several are sprung so badly that they jab you aggressively in the rear. A woman in row M actually cried out ‘Ouch!’ during the first act. Something for Spacey to get to the bottom of, as it were.”
