British theatre is booming

But theatre people, like farmers, can never be wholly contented with either sun or rain. There are also problems and worries, especially in a subsidised sector that accounts for almost all our new and cutting-edge drama. Private giving and corporate sponsorship are in decline, in the regions seriously and damagingly so. Arts Council grants to theatre organisations, which now run at some £112 million in England, look pretty safe until the current agreement expires in 2011, but after that the axe may start to lop and chop. “The whole game changed last year when the financial system simply collapsed,” says Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National, which receives £19.2 million from the Arts Council. “We don’t know what will happen. But how can I ask for special treatment if there are 10 per cent cuts in education? How can I stand up and say we’re more important than the health service?”

Cuts at the National and other subsidised theatres would have a huge knock-on effect on the commercial sector and especially on a West End that has become dependent on them for most of its more upmarket drama. Without a continuing healthy public subsidy, plays such as War Horse and An Inspector Calls would never have made the lucrative transfer to the commercial stage.

But meanwhile let’s celebrate what’s good and encouraging. The West End looks pretty certain to break box-office and audience figures for the fourth successive year. In 2008-09 nearly 14 million seats were sold at the Society of London Theatre’s 50 constituent venues, most of them commercial, and takings amounted to £483.6 million. Well into 2009-10 these figures are up by 4 per cent and advance sales at West End box offices are approaching the £50 million mark.

A musical can cost zillions to stage and keep running, especially if it’s ensconced in a theatre that typically costs between £20,000 and £30,000 a week to rent and/or has a lead actor receiving thousands in wages, but if it succeeds it can make zillions too. Even without Rowan Atkinson as Fagin, the year-old revival of Oliver! took a Drury Lane record of £690,000 in the autumn half-term week. More than ten years after its opening Mamma Mia! is playing to 95 per cent capacity and has an advance of £5 million. Phantom of the Opera, which opened in 1986, currently has an advance of £2 million and still sometimes sells out completely. Nicholas Allott, the managing director of Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, says he expected the still longer running Les Mis?rables to last two or three years when the organisation moved the show from the Palace to the Queen’s in 2004, but its audiences are 20 per cent up on 2008 and its advance is £1.5 million.

And it’s not only musicals that are hot. Enron, Lucy Prebble’s play about financial scandal, sold out when it was staged at the little Minerva Theatre in Chichester and the Royal Court, and has already taken £750,000 at the No?l Coward box office, an astonishing amount for a straight play, more than two months before its reopening there in January.

Similar stories come from the subsidised sector. Both the North’s leading reps, the Royal Exchange in Manchester and the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, have nervously trimmed their spending, Leeds freezing its staff wages. Yet both have been pleasantly surprised to find audiences and takings holding up, Manchester currently being £150,000 ahead of budget. But why is hard to explain. Are people failing to take foreign holidays or buy new cars, while finding that lower mortgages leave them more money to spend? Is television less likely to keep people at home in the evening, now that programmes can so easily be recorded and seen at other times, as Richard Pulford, the CEO of the Society of London Theatres (SOLT) surmises?

“When there’s a war or a crisis or a recession we want to gather by the camp-fire and hear stories” is the theory of Howard Panter, who founded and runs the Ambassador Theatre Group with his wife, Rosemary Squire.

Not that any theatre sector is without its problems. For instance, the commercial impresarios now stage few straight plays and even fewer new ones. A look at the current SOLT list reveals that a total of 23 musicals and just 14 plays are running in their theatres, among them the good old Mousetrap, but only one strong piece that isn’t a revival, a film adaptation or a transfer from a subsidised theatre: Andrew Bovell’s Speaking In Tongues. Meanwhile, some 100 new plays a year are staged by the National, the Royal Court, the Bush, Hampstead and other publicly funded theatres. “I’d love to do more,” says Nica Burns, the co-owner of five West End theatres and the co-producer of the current revivals of Beckett’s Endgame and Jim Cartwright’s Rise and Fall of Little Voice, “but if I don’t make the books balance I go bankrupt.”

You can see her point. It’s increasingly hard for straight-play impresarios to recoup the rising costs that mean it took £550,000 to produce Little Voice and £400,000 to stage even the four-character Endgame. It’s hard to keep a play running unless it regularly sells 70 or 80 per cent of its seats as against the 40 per cent that would have kept it ticking over 30 or 40 years ago. And, just to make hardness harder, modern agents discourage actors from committing themselves to runs that last longer than 16 to 18 weeks, compared with the 26 to 30 that might produce a profit.

Moreover, those actors need to have some sort of star appeal. The presence of John Simm in Speaking In Tongues surely explains why a strange, original play is filling 80 per cent of its seats six weeks after its opening — and without Keira Knightley as the heroine would a revival of Molière’s Misanthrope be coming to the Comedy next month?

There are exceptions, such as the ultra-topical Enron. Yasmina Reza’s Art went through 26 casts, many of them little-known, and ended up taking £140 million worldwide, and Stephen Daldry’s gloriously imaginative but underwhelmingly cast revival of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls has just surfaced in the West End for what seems the millionth time. But such momentum is rare, leading to an obvious conclusion. Increasingly commercial producers in and out of London have learnt to rely on the publicly subsidised sector that they once accused of offering unfair competition.

The war is over and the result is, among other big successes, War Horse. That play has come into the West End from the National, The 39 Steps from the Tricycle, the Lenny Henry Othello from West Yorkshire Playhouse, and they’ll soon to be followed by Enron and Jez Butterworth’s fine Jerusalem from the Court and, from the Everyman, Liverpool, Jonathan Pryce as the tramp in Pinter’s Caretaker.

Without such transfers and the odd co-production with subsidised reps, the preponderance of musicals in the West End — in 2008-09 they made £335 million, compared with £72 million for straight drama — would be even greater than it already is. But here’s a serious worry. Suppose a new Tory administration, or even an improbably long-lived Labour government, were to impose cuts on the Arts Council. What would that mean for drama in both subsidised and commercial sectors? What for experiment, risktaking and the future of writing, acting, directing, designing? After all, how did Tom Stoppard and Ian McKellen achieve world renown? Credit a National Theatre and an RSC that spotted and developed their rare talents.

Dominic Cooke, of the Court, led the attack when, even before recession struck, the Shadow Secretary for the Arts, Jeremy Hunt, started talking up private money for the arts. That struck him as possible code for instituting the sort of system — plenty of money from the box office and philanthropic individuals and organisations but virtually nil from public sources — that explains why the American theatre is so much less busy and creative than the British. Since then both Hunt and his colleague Ed Vaizey have emphasised their commitment to a theatre sector said to generate nearly £3 billion a year for the British economy, Vaizey adding that “if the Tories win on a Thursday, there will be far fewer people in the arts world waking up in a cold sweat on Friday”.

Cooke has spoken to both men and thinks them “great guys” but, like many other theatre directors, wonders if they’ll become the victims of events, especially with the 2012 Olympics demanding more and more public money. “I was worried; I’m still worried,” he says.

With that private money becoming even more endangered — and two of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s big sponsors have recently withdrawn their support, helping to reduce its corporate income by £100,000 — the future of the British theatre does indeed give cause for concern. Yet the theatre’s appeal has seldom been so evident. Here’s Cooke himself, rejoicing in the success of Enron and Jerusalem, two packed-out plays that, he thinks, show that there’s a demand for work that brings people together to question received values, look askance at the status quo and “help them to make sense of the mess we’re in”. Here’s Nicholas Hytner announcing that the National staged 25 plays in the supposedly impossible year of 2008-09, sold 817,000 seats, ended with a surplus of £456,000, and went on to open every Sunday, become a seven-day-a-week operation and successfully institute NT Live, meaning that audiences in more than 300 cinemas here and abroad have been able to see several plays in performance, among them Phèdre with the great Helen Mirren as Racine’s doomed heroine.

And across the river The Lion King has been seen by eight million people and, ten years after its opening, still fills 93 per cent of the Lyceum’s 2,000 seats, still takes a weekly average of £500,000 at the box office, still promises to run for ever. And the Lyceum is one of the theatres that Live Nation has sold to Panter and Squire’s Ambassador Theatre Group. Sounds as if they got a good deal. Sounds great for the British theatre.

WIN SOME, LOSE SOME

Flops

Twang! (1965) Both the director, Joan Littlewood, and its star, James Booth, walked out of Lionel Bart’s musical version of Robin Hood after it was panned by the critics. Having funded it himself — and another flop, La Strada, which closed after one performance — Bart was left in in £158,000 of debt. Selling the rights to his most successful musical, Oliver!, he tried to relaunch Twang! with Ronnie Corbett as the lead, but it closed after six weeks.

The Fields of Ambrosia (1996) Set in the Deep South in 1918, the “electric chair musical” told the story of a state executioner who fell in love with one of the prisoners. Damned widely by critics as tasteless, it closed after two weeks. The Times theatre critic Benedict Nightingale remembers it as “the worst piece of theatre I’ve seen in my life”.

Gone With the Wind (2008) Adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Trevor Nunn’s much anticipated production, with the Pop Idol star Darius Danesh and Jill Paice, cost £4.75 million, but suffered cutting reviews and poor attendance. Nunn shaved 15 minutes off its runtime after accusations that it was too long, but it closed more than three months early.

Hits

Phantom of the Opera (1986) Opened in London at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom is now in its 24th year. In 2006 it overtook Cats to become Broadway’s longest-running show, and is also Broadway’s highest-grossing show to date, having taken a staggering $740 million in total.

An Inspector Calls (1992) Now on its seventh national tour, Stephen Daldry’s production is the longest-running play revival in history. First opened at the National with Kenneth Cranham as Inspector Goole, it went to the West End, then Broadway, followed by a second West End run that lasted for seven years.

Louise Cohen

BOOK NOW - TEN HOT TICKETS

The Misanthrope Keira Knightley makes her West End debut in Molière’s classic. Comedy, SW1 (www.ambassadortickets.com/themisanthrope; 0844 871 7627), Dec 17 to Mar 13

Love Never Dies Andrew Lloyd Webber’s masked hero returns in the world premiere of the sequel to Phantom of the Opera. Adelphi, WC2 www.adelphitheatre.co.uk; 0844 4124651), Feb 26 to Sep 10

La Clique The cabaret, burlesque and circus sensation in a limited eight-week run. Roundhouse, NW1 (www.lacliquelondon. com; 0844 4828008), Nov 20 to Jan 17

Legally Blonde Sheridan Smith and Duncan James, of Blue, star in the Broadway production of the hit movie . Savoy, WC2 (www.ambassadortickets.com/legallyblonde; 0844 871 7627), Dec 5 to May 23

Enron The hit play based on the biggest bankruptcy in US history transfers to the West End . No?l Coward, WC2 (www. noel-coward- theatre.com; 0844 4825140 16), Jan 16 to May 8

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The hit Broadway production opens with an all-black cast including James Earl Jones. Novello, WC2 (www.catwestend. com; 0844 4825170), Nov 21 to Apr 10

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour Tom Stoppard’s provocative play about Russian dissidents returns. National, SE1 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk; 020-7452 3000), Jan 9 to Feb 17

Red Alfred Molina plays Mark Rothko in a new play about the troubled artist. Donmar Warehouse, WC2 (www. donmarwarehouse.com; 0844 8717624), Dec 3 to Feb 6

The Caretaker Pinter’s modern classic starring Jonathan Pryce transfers from Liverpool. Trafalgar Studios, SW1 (www.ambassadortickets.com/thecaretaker; 0844 871 7627), Jan 12 to Apr 17

Twelfth Night Richard Wilson dons Malvolio’s yellow stockings in the hit Stratford transfer. Duke of York’s, WC2 (www.ambassadortickets.com/twelfthnight; 0844 871 7627), Dec 19 to Feb 27

Sarah Hajibagheri