Producers are, inevitably, a glass nearly-full breed rather than a glass half-empty one: they always travel hopefully. No one, Bialystock and Bloom apart, ever intends to produce a flop, I’m sure. But after watching the revival of Ring Round the Moon at the Playhouse last month, which I saw at the final preview the night before it opened, I wrote in my Sunday Express review: “When a character played by Leigh Lawson gleefully tears up bank notes, I couldn’t help feeling that the producers of this production might be doing the same thing with this deeply old-fashioned evening.” And lo and behold, an early closing notice has been duly posted for the production to close at the end of this month, with a release issued yesterday declaring, “Despite positive reviews, ticket sales have not been sufficient to sustain the run and therefore the producers have made the difficult decision to close the show.”
Of course, critics aren’t always right – I would have said the same thing about We Will Rock You (or indeed for the prospects for transferring Les Miserables from the Barbican to the West End all those years ago).
But while musicals are still mainly the prerogative of the commercial theatre, who – outside of that famous RSC collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh that of course produced Les Mis — pay their own money to take their chances on the hope that even greater riches will come to them, commercial producers of plays walk an even more precarious tight-rope, since the market for plays is already so well served by the subsidised houses.
Places like the National, Donmar and Almeida already have the classics revival market pretty much sown up, matching stars and product together on limited runs to produce box office gold: a commercial producer like Sonia Friedman would have killed to have had Ewan McGregor in Othello (and would have brought it to a much wider audience that the 12-week Donmar run produced), but of course the point for McGregor (and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who ran away with the play – and the Olivier – in the title role) is the security of friends like director Michael Grandage that removes some of the personal risk, and the built-in audience of the Donmar that takes away the commercial one. A Donmar revival of Ring Round the Moon wouldn’t have had the same difficulties as the West End one (and might well have also been able to secure a much more high-profile cast, too, to guarantee its audience), and indeed is doing just this kind of play soon – in June, Grandage directs Penelope Wilton and Margaret Tyzack in a rare revival of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden.
The difficulties are even greater for producers of new plays: first port of call for agents representing new plays are inevitably places like the National, Royal Court, Almeida, Bush, Hampstead and Soho, and now that – David Pugh and Yasmina Reza apart, whose latest collaboration God of Carnage is now previewing at the Gielgud – few commercial producers seem to invest, in any sense, anymore in building up long-term relationships with living playwrights (as Codron, say, once did with everyone from Ayckbourn and Hampton to Joe Orton), they’re left with the scraps of what they can find elsewhere. Seeing Practicum Theatre’s production of Daniel Joshua Rubin’s The Viewing Room at the Arts last night, it was difficult not to dispel the notion that the producers James Flynn and Samantha Wright had chosen it for the fact that it had two roles for themselves to play. But as vanity producing goes, it did them no favours.
For while they might have done everything right on paper – the play came with a pedigree of having been originally produced at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, and they even managed to persuade a current TV star to join them in the enterprise in the shapely shape of Leonard Roberts (billed, front-of-house and n the posters, as “star of TV’s Heroes) – no one apparently stopped to read this 10-year-old play and notice how improbable and unplayable it was. The theatre it is in doesn’t help, either: while it might have gained the required claustrophobic intensity in somewhere like the White Bear, any remaining possibilities of tension was killed by being played out into a literally vacant void at the Arts. With an audience of barely thirty in last night, the director took the unusual step of closing off the stalls entirely and putting us all in the dress circle, where we didn’t rattle around quite so obviously. But this is another flop that the producers should have seen coming.
There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between the people who run commercial West End theatre and the people who seek out and perform new writing in small theatres. Whipping It Up moved from the Bush to the West End because it had Richard Wilson, but that was a rare exception that vaulted over the barriers. Perhaps the gap is cultural, perhaps the obstacles are just financial, or perhaps the West End theatres are just too big, or the fringe theatres too small. I've just seen Mike Bartlett's Artefacts at the Bush - excellent. This is the sort of play that deserves some kind of exposure in the West End after its national tour but would sink without trace in a big theatre without a star cast.