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Do not let yourselves be taken in by the Society of London Theatre, official voice of the commercial West End producers.
Last month it went wild with delight, announcing that 2007 was West End theatre's most successful year on record, with box-office takings of almost £470 million, up more than £69 million on 2006. But the lion's share of this figure was made on the big musicals. What of the straight play, that chronic invalid of the West End, whose condition has long given cause for anxiety?
The most up-to-date news suggests the patient has taken a turn for the worse. 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 longrunners, The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black - compared with 24 musicals.
Walk down Shaftesbury Avenue today. You will see three of the street's four theatres, the Apollo, Lyric and Gielgud, all of them best suited to straight plays, are dark. The Comedy and Novello are similarly closed. Of another 11 West End playhouses which regularly range between musicals and straight plays, all 11 are occupied by song and dance shows.
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.
There is now a danger the West End may soon become a virtual Disneyland, festooned with musicals, many theatres converted to house stand-upcomedy shows, cabaret, lap dancing or casinos. Optimists still insist it is absurdly alarmist to turn Cassandralike-about the straight play's future. They claim July and August are always the cruellest months of the year for plays in the West End. Besides, they insist, there is some good news just around the corner.
The Apollo opens again at the end of August with the come-hitherish attraction of Josh Hartnett in an adaptation of the Hollywood film Rain Man. And the Lyric and Novello will soon be back in business, too. The Donmar's artistic director, Michael Grandage, will launch a year-long season of plays at Wyndham's, to each of which is allocated one bright star of the calibre of Judi Dench, Jude Law, Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi. Ticket prices will rise no higher than £32, almost half the price of the best West End seats, thanks to the fact that the crowd-pulling stars will not be taking percentages of box-office receipts and will receive the same salaries as the other players.
Nica Burns, president of the Society of London Theatre and the obstinately optimistic co-owner of the Apollo, Lyric, Garrick, Duchess and Vaudeville theatres, does concede times are tough and testing for commercial producers of straight plays, summer or not. It is difficult to win audiences for new plays in the West End. The best crowd-pulling playwrights of today, from Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard to David Hare and Christopher Hampton prefer to have their plays at the National amd Royal Court. Sponsors prefer to put their money into subsidised theatres.
And the National, where you can easily park and have supper or snacks under one roof, offers a far easier play-going option than the West End. What's more, the National competes these days with the West End by mounting 20th-century commercial classics, such as Noël Coward's Present Laughter. One of Burns's answers is to make straight plays major events - as with Daniel Radclifffe's appearance in Equus, or Brief Encounter, staged in a theatre and film version at the Haymarket's Cineworld.
But how many producers can and will do so? Bill Kenwright, who for decades has produced more straight plays on the commercial West End stage than anyone else, has no straight plays on in London now - although the musicals Blood Brothers and Joseph are his. Last week the usually voluble Kenwright would make no comment about the situation.
One authoritative observer of the West End scene comments: "At the moment Bill feels you just can't get audiences for straight plays in town and he's spent a fortune losing money on a host of worthwhile productions. Bill is a vital force in the West End. I fervently hope he'll go on but I don't know if he will." Sonia Friedman, the most prolific producer of new plays in the commercial sector, also refuses to talk about the difficulties for fear that people will say she's crying wolf.
In this crisis of confidence, theatre owners and producers must change their artistic policies and their theatres. They need to make the dead-by-daylight playhouses inviting, like the National or the Young Vic, with their all-day bars, snack counters and restaurants. The gallery areas of West End playhouses should be closed down and replaced with all-day bars and restaurants serving after-show suppers.
West End producers should also spark commercially valuable controversy. Imagine a five-play themed season devoted to resistance and rebellion against the established order.
It could consist of Wedekind's Spring Awakening, with its sexually questing adolescents up against convention; Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, that extraordinary Twenties piece of Americana in which a man is replaced by a machine and murders his boss; Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies, whose undercover, wartime message is an appeal to resistance to the Nazis and the Vichy government; O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, which takes a risky look at the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the Civil War of 1922 while questioning attitudes to religion, sex and patriotism; and it would end with Edward Bond's Saved, in which neglected and violent youth turn murderous.
Since the National under Nicholas Hytner scarcely explores the modern, international repertoire, West End producers could capture those significant audiences the National neglects. Would it work? Well. Schiller's Don Carlos, the sort of classic the National would not touch, proved a smash hit in Shaftesbury Avenue in 2005 and made money, too. By offering a seriously exciting repertoire of a sort the National now scorns, the West End could take on a new lease of life. If we are to avoid it becoming a theme park, it needs to take such risks.
Reader views (3)
I, too, fear for the serious play in the West End. As someone recently retired, I find that the National, Almeida, Donmar, Royal Court and Young Vic have discounts available for Senior Citizens. The West End theatres are extremely expensive with what can only be termed ridiculous ticket prices, and unless you turn up on the day, there are no discounted tickets available. Who wants to have an uncomfortable tube journey on the off chance of getting a cheap ticket on the day! To get cheap, often poor visibility tickets one has to go to the booking office as on-line ticket agencies never seem to offer the few cheap seats that are available and charge a massive booking fee as well. Until the theatre managers charge realistical prices many theatregoers will not go and see serious plays in the West End - my wife and I try and see serious plays if possible, but am poorer as a result!
- Roger Harris, Wanstead, London, England
I fear for the play in the west end. It makes no sense to expect punters to pay £45 plus booking fees for a play when the NT, Donmar, Royal Court, Almeida, and Young vic are serving up high quality productions for £30 or less. Surely the (sold out?) Donmar season shows the way. This means actors working for more reasonable wages, surely a grand a week for a job you love is no hardship! It also means a sensible pricing policy where only seats with good views which merit top price status being sold as such. There needs to be a change of perspective from producers, agents, actors and managements and marketing bods for plays to flourish once more. Finally it would really help if the critics remembered they were writing for the public at large, rather than a select band of Ibsen loving teatrophiles.
- Igor, London
Couldn't agree more. Candyfloss is fine as an occasional treat but a steady diet of it quickly nauseates.
The tail is wagging the dog as musicals used to generate pop hits; now even the most vacuous pop songs are being tied together with gossamer-thin plot lines (actually just one-liners between songs) in the form of so-called musicals.
- Pb Morris, WV, USA
