Last night saw the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue join the roster of Delfont Mackintosh owned theatres that have had a comprehensive refurbishment, when it re-opened in a state of glistening luxury with the transfer of the Chichester Minerva production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart. This latest refurbishment, costing some £3million, has entirely overhauled the formerly tired and decrepit auditorium, the public areas (including extra loos, particularly for women – the eternal bugbear of West End theatres!), and the stone-cleaning of the Portland stone exterior, plus new exterior architectural lighting. (The press release, noting “the needs of modern audiences”, ominously doesn’t mention any backstage upgrades for the comparable needs of modern actors, but if Delfont Mackintosh’s previous work on theatres like the Novello is anything to go by, which I visited coincidentally enough when I interviewed Patrick Stewart there, I am sure these have been attended to).
But while these handsome (and pricey) refurbishments are hugely to be welcomed, they surely must embarrass and shame the rest of the West End who are simply not keeping up. [continue by clicking below]
For Cameron Mackintosh, of course, his theatres have become not only a labour of love but also a personal legacy – as he told me in an interview last year, “In the end, you have a responsibility. Having these theatres is lovely, but they’re a big responsibility – they’re all a hundred years old, and you know that if you left your own home untended for a hundred years, you’d seen be cold, miserable and wet, so why should it be any different for a theatre? Most of the theatres I have haven’t had much cash put into them since built, so what I want to do is leave as my legacy theatres that will still be there for another me to run when I’m gone and hopefully someone else will come along and redo them when need doing.”
It is also part of Mackintosh’s determination, also exemplified in his producing ethos, to give a great all-round entertainment experience: as he also told me, “People will go to any ropey place if the show is great, but what you hope is that they come and visit the West End two or three times a year. And if they find that it was a glamorous night out – you could have a drink, get a snack, and it wasn’t hell to have a pee – that might encourage them to come back one or two times more.”
Mackintosh of course has made a lot of money from the theatre, so it could be said that he has more to reinvest it than most. But Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t short of a bob or two, and yet his theatres only seem to have surface improvements made. Though the exterior of the Palace was handsomely redone some years ago, the interior is still a dusty, fusty grey mess – and the stalls gents loo, for instance, still feels positively Victorian. (Mackintosh’s loos are like those on a luxury liner, by comparison).
As private businesses, it is of course – as Cameron also pointed out to me – a personal choice how their money is or isn’t spent; Lloyd Webber has duly spent more on accumulating personal art than attending to theatrical architecture. But Cameron points out that they are part of the historical legacy of the past as well as the future: “Most of these theatres were built by producers who had a few hits and decided to build theatres, so what goes round, comes round.”
Attempts by other theatre owners, driven by a Theatres Trust report a few years ago now, to secure government funding to fund the upgrades to their theatres haven’t come to anything, since the buildings – though used by the public, in exchange for their ticket money – aren’t in the public domain. Thanks to the lottery, we’ve seen lots of subsidised theatres, brand-new like Hampstead or venerable like the Royal Court, fund major interventions to their home bases; but the West End beyond Mackintosh needs to catch up.
If owning West End theatres is such a bad business model that work on them cannot be kept up by the conventional route of renting them out, perhaps theatre owners should surrender them to a government agency to oversee, use lottery funds to refurbish them, and then rent them back from the agency to run on their behalf.
It is fantastic that so much money is being spent but I wish they would remember that the number one priority should be the comfort of the audience whilst watching a show.
In the stalls at least the Novello now has terrible seats with hard straight backs, guaranteeing that 15 minutes into any show the punter is wishing they were anywhere but stuck in the middle of a row with no room to move their feet and the creeping agony of horrific lower back pain.
I agree about the Novello, those straight backed seats are hell (plus they took out the central aisle to make more money).
These theatres are making money, so I'm not going to thank the ownere for doing them up to a good standard. They'd close if they didn't make money, and we who pay for our tickets should demand basic comfort. I'm dreading several upcoming evenings in the West End cheap seats in the coming month...