Let us play
Is there still an audience for plays? It may seem a daft question. But I was having lunch with a leading theatre executive who suggested the demand for plays was diminishing. There’s plenty of evidence to support him. There are now 27 musicals in the West End; everywhere you look you find adaptations of old films and books. And the young show an increasing appetite for the kind of physical theatre provided by groups like Kneehigh, Punchdrunk or Complicité. So have traditional plays had their day?
I passionately hope not. My conviction is that there is still a hunger for drama if it is sufficiently exciting. We’ve been told for ages that Shaw is a dead letter, then along comes Marianne Elliott’s revival of Saint Joan which has people rushing to the National. Rupert Goold’s Chichester Macbeth, destined for the Gielgud, quickly became a hot Sussex ticket. Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch, had an extended run at the Royal Court even though the play itself fell apart in the last ten minutes. And I’m told that Steve Thompson’s Whipping It Up, which enjoyed a modest run in the West End, is raking it in on tour, thanks partly to the presence of Richard Wilson.
Audiences, in my experience, still want plays for all sorts of reasons. Plays take you into other worlds, refresh and enliven language, illuminate your own experience of life. They can also induce the kind of ecstasy often associated with musicals. A classic case recently was Peter Hall’s revival of Pygmalion at the Theatre Royal Bath. In the famous scene where Higgins shows off the re-modelled Eliza at his mother’s party, the audience seemed to be in a state of delirium. It was partly the result of Michelle Dockery’s performance. But it was also because Shaw realised the truth of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s dictum that comedy springs from human beings behaving like automata. Eliza speaks with robotic precision: the only problem is that what she talks about is murder amongst the lower classes!
So, if there is still an audience for plays, why are there so few of them in the West End? The obvious answer is costs. It requires a minimum of £300,000 to mount a play. Top ticket prices consequently hover around £40. Unsurprisingly, audiences opt for musicals which offer the prospect of spectacle and songs. I was assured recently that high ticket-prices for plays are also a result of greedy investors demanding a quick return on their outlay and that producers could get away with a top price of £25, if only their “angels” were less devilishly demanding.
Much rests on the success, or otherwise, of Jonathan Kent’s new season opening next month at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. If it works, it could be a model for the future. Already the doom-mongers are busy suggesting that it is wildly optimistic to schedule Edward Bond’s The Sea for a three-month run in the West End. There are even those who say The Country Wife is not commercial. Yet back in the 1950s, Wycherley’s wonderfully filthy play had a good run at the Adelphi. And why shouldn’t The Sea, starring the great Eileen Atkins, prove Bond is a box-office draw? I may be mad, but I still believe there is a hunger for plays. Over the coming months we shall all be watching the Haymarket intently to see if I, or the nay-sayers, are right.
