Plays are back - and the West End is loving it

Last year doom and gloommongers, myself among them, feared plays were becoming an endangered species on the commercial stage.

As the Evening Standard celebrates its theatre awards, I detect encouraging signs of change for the better - a few, serious green shoots have begun to sprout in a West End jungle where in 2006 the shows that bloomed best were musicals.

Last year, a vast army of shows had starrily trooped into London and occupied almost every playhouse viable for song and dance. Theatre owners thrilled to the sound of their very own music - millions of pounds shovelled into their bank accounts. Advance bookings for the likes of The Sound of Music and Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat were so vast that they would have substantially funded any bid for the sinking Northern Rock.

It was no surprise in 2006 that producer Matthew Byam Shaw, who brought not only Michael Grandage's production of Schiller's Don Carlos into Shaftesbury Avenue but also Peter Morgan's extraordinary Frost/Nixon memoir, complained that he couldn't interest theatre-owners in plays any more. They had ogling eyes only for the next Broadway musical.

Remember, warns that prolific play impresario Bill Kenwright, the gamble faced by play-producers, up against the National, the Royal Court and the Almeida which can slot their stars into a programme months in advance. Commercial producers, meanwhile, have to wait and scheme for theatres to become available, while star actors are reluctant to play for long in the West End nowadays. In that light, we should reconsider the West End stage of 2007. For despite the flourishing of musicals, in terms of straight plays it has been rather a good year.

The mesmerising Lee Evans cast fresh light on Pinter's comedy of menace, The Dumb Waiter. Rupert Doone superbly vitalised Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie, with Amanda Hale and Mark Umbers as the never-can-be lovers wringing more pathos from their close encounter than any revival I can recollect. Had Maggie Smith, as Edward Albee's much-scorned Lady from Dubuque, played it more appropriately at the studio-style Almeida and not the Haymarket, it would have almost sold out. And Orlando Bloom, charisma-free in David Storey's Seventies drama of angst at a Northern working-class family reunion, In Celebration, at least made that serious-minded revival possible.

Admittedly there are still 25 musicals in the West End. The Duchess, Duke of York's, Lyric, Ambassadors, Aldwych, Playhouse and Coward, traditionally home to straight plays, have turned to song and dance. There are now just 10 plays in the West End. Among them, The Mousetrap is, after 55 years in town, best categorised as a museum piece, forever stuffed and mounted in a beautiful playhouse. Rupert Goold's sensational Macbeth, Mamet's macho-minded Glengarry Glen Ross, the pathos-laden Shadowlands, that dirty-minded Restoration classic The Country Wife, the film-into-play-time Swimming with Sharks, Elling and the sexually obsessed farce Boeing Boeing all strike me as first-rate pieces of theatre in their wildly different ways. And of these, Elling is the sole piece of new writing.

Now suppose four or five of those eight theatres that have suddenly switched over to musicals revert next year to straight plays, as I believe is likely, then the ratio of musicals to plays in the West End would be an acceptable 21 to 14. "The ratio of plays to musicals has probably shifted permanently," Byam Shaw concedes. " I worry about continuing to get new plays from the National and the Royal Court into the West End but after visiting Broadway this year, I thank my lucky stars that it's not as bad here as it is there for nonmusicals."

He has three new plays in development, meant for West End production in 2008. A year ago he would have met with shaking heads when he tried to find spaces for them. Now he has been told by two theatre owners that three theatres are expected to be available early in the new year and that they are intent on filling them with straight plays. Plays are on the way back and in a form that offers a blueprint for a revitalised West End.

Bill Kenwright, whose productions of Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular and Peter Hall's revival of Noel Coward's cocaine-and-incest diatribe The Vortex are now headed for London, points admiringly to what could be a vital sign of the times. Cameron Mackintosh has given the Donmar Warehouse's artistic director, Michael Grandage, artistic control of Wyndham's for a year, beginning in September 2008. These days no producer intent upon presenting plays in the West End is given such a chance - to plan a year-long season in advance at a specific theatre. Grandage has accordingly devised an exciting season - Kenneth Branagh in Chekhov's Ivanov, Derek Jacobi in Twelfth Night, Judi Dench in Mishima's Madame de Sade and Jude Law's Hamlet. If it works, there will be more Grandage programming at Wyndham's.

Something similar is happening at the Haymarket, where theatre directors are being given the chance to mount a yearlong repertory of plays. The first of them, Jonathan Kent, has launched the scheme with The Country Wife, with Eileen Atkins to follow in Edward Bond's The Sea.

This could be the answer to the problem of presenting straight plays in the commercial West End. Theatre owners hand over the programming for their theatres for a year at a time. Men such as Grandage and Kent then can plan in advance, a privilege not entrusted to ordinary West End producers, forever waiting for a playhouse to come free.

There are other crucial problems. Theatre owners need to reduce rentals of theatres for producers and ticket costs. The Government ought to regard West End theatres as akin to historic buildings which the state should part-own and maintain, reducing ticket prices for audiences and rentals for play producers.

Such theatres are too precious to be left to theatre owners whose motive is profit-making. This may smack of pipe-dreaming. In the meantime, the Wyndham's and Haymarket seasons could offer the West End a fresh lease of life.