It’s taken until August for people to notice, but the sudden coincidence of three prime theatres being simultaneously dark side-by-side on Shaftesbury Avenue, plus the nearby Comedy - has given rise to reports that the West End could be heading towards serious difficulty, and particularly when it comes to serious fare. The West End may have had an all-time record breaking year last year, as I previously reported here, but most of those figures, in terms of attendance and revenue, were driven by musicals.
So no wonder, too, that some commentators are also noting the threat to the straight play in this newly-beleaguered West End: Nicholas de Jongh wrote a feature in the Standard last Friday pointing out that, “Apart from the brilliant hybrid version of Brief Encounter playing in a Haymarket cinema there are just six plays in the West End this week - of which two are those clapped-out long-runners, The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black — compared with 24 musicals.”
He goes on to take a longer view, pointing out that “there have been bad times before - and often. In 1987 all four Shaftesbury Avenue theatres were dark for a period in summer. Ten summers later, though, 14 straight plays or comedies ran through summer, more than twice as many as today, with just 15 musicals playing. This statistic is crucial, indicative of the relentless West End shift from straight plays.” He then predicts a bleak future: “There is now a danger the West End may soon become a virtually Disneyland, festooned with musicals, many theatres converted to house stand-up comedy shows, cabaret, lap-dancing or casinos.”
But while it is unquestionably true that, as on Broadway, musicals have taken on a dominant share of the market - and given that the West End is likewise a purely commercial marketplace, with no responsibility to do anything other than make money for the theatre’s owners and the producers who rent them, that’s no surprise - the play is far from down and out for the count. The summer is simply not the time for them, yet even in this marketplace, two plays bravely entered into the commercial fray in the last few weeks, The Female of the Species and Under the Blue Sky, that led me to note here that “the ongoing productivity of the West End is a thing of wonder.” Broadway, by contrast, simply goes into hibernation in the summer, and routinely sees a post-Tony Awards clear-out of the shows that didn’t win (or haven’t been performing well).
Perhaps we simply shouldn’t be so shy of theatres standing empty, like they do on Broadway in the summer: though theatre owners don’t like them, obviously, because then there is no way to pay their contras (the fixed running costs attached to running the buildings), they also mean that the audience that shrinks naturally in the summer as locals leave town (and tourists, particularly Americans, fail to take their place) won’t be spread so thinly amongst what’s left. Indeed, given the lack of air-conditioning at many West End theatres, perhaps those that fail to install them should simply be forced to go dark in the summer, as I’ve suggested before: as I previously wrote here, “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 it’s affordable to install some kind of air conditioning after all.”
But also, of course, the crisis in plays is never as bad as it seems in London, since there are many opportunities for audiences who want to see them to go elsewhere, from the National and Shakespeare’s Globe to the Donmar and fringe. And empty theatres mean an opportunity for renewal of the repertoire: a West End purely gridlocked by long-running hits means no change is possible.
None of the theatres that are currently dark, apart from the Comedy for which no new attraction has yet been announced, will be empty for long, in any case: future attractions have now been announced for each of them. The Lyric is set to host a new flamenco show as a filler, Flamenco Flamen’ka (http://www.nimaxtheatres.com/flamenco.asp), and will then be followed by the transfer of the Take That musical Never Forget from the Savoy for an open-ended run. Of course, this highlights another trend, namely for theatres that were traditionally playhouses to suddenly find themselves booked solid with musicals (In de Jongh’s feature, he points out that, “Of 11 West End playhouses which regularly range between musicals and straight plays, all 11 are occupied by song and dance shows”). Such things, however, are cyclical; even Broadway saw some 12 plays open last autumn, as I wrote here, as against just three musicals, though the commercial life of several of them was ironically subsequently seriously compromised by the damaging stagehands’ strike.
In London, Nica Burns, who runs Nimax Theatres, has been particularly guilty of shifting the balance between musicals and plays in her theatres, giving the tiny Duchess over to Buddy and the Garrick to Zorro; and now with Never Forget moving into their Lyric, musicals are dominating their repertoire. But as a landlord, I accept that her first responsibility is to find product to fill her theatres, and she will naturally take the best commercial opportunities to do so. A friend ruefully remarked, however, about Never Forget going into the Lyric: “The fabric of the Lyric may not stand the combination of Take That and hen nights. I have visions of it tumbling into Shaftesbury Avenue. Perhaps that’s Nica’s plan.” But next to this has to be weighted the fact that Burns is herself bringing a new stage adaptation of Rain Man to the Apollo next door from August 28; let’s just hope it keeps the rain out.
Cameron Mackintosh, of course, has made it his personal mission to upgrade the theatres in his care, and the results have been startling, both inside and out - just last week I was walking down Charing Cross Road and saw the scaffolding come off Wyndham’s, at last, where next month the Donmar set up a year-long West End residency, and it looks sensational. But though it is clearly driven by a genuine enthusiasm for theatrical architecture, it also has a strong commercial imperative: his theatres routinely attract stronger product as a result, and their success therefore becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But even here it’s not surprising to find a bit of filler here and there: before the RSC’s Christmas residency begins at the Novello, for instance, there’ll be a season of last year’s Edinburgh hit Eurobeat.
Mackintosh has proved, however, that change is possible in the West End; and just as the Donmar’s West End season at Wyndham’s is also making a serious intervention on pricing structure that will see prices range from £10 to £32.50, that lead is also being instructively followed by another incoming show to a Mackintosh house, when Six Characters in Search of An Author transfers from Chichester’s Minerva (where it is currently running to August 23) to the Gielgud, and the price range will similarly be £10 to £32.50. This challenging, unsettling production could be a tough sell in any market; but its producers Carole Winter and Michael Edwards are giving it it’s best chance of reaching a wider audience both thanks to a reasonable ticket price and offering it in a theatre that is actually fit for the purpose. That way redemption may finally lie to save the West End play.
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