------WebKitFormBoundaryUoeW3j6zwqPeP86k ÐÏà¡±á>þÿ <>þÿÿÿ9:;ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿì¥Áb ø¿3tjbjböÅöÅ 0Ìœ§œ§&bæ%ÿÿÿÿÿÿˆ²²²ú¬¬*.6dNdNdN8œN”0OÄk0PP"8P8P8P8P8P8PÔjÖjÖjÖjÖjÖjÖj,±nRqäk*8P8P8P8P8PkY**8P8Pk.YYY8Pf*8P*8PÔjYJ”Þ>X”ì>**8PÔjYYª8i|**°jôOç&àÄdNžWf´i°j$Ek<kÆiêçqYçq$°jY.¤5ÀF¤ÀF The West End: Drowning or Waving? An essay by Julia Potts 2006-07 Fellow Clore Leadership Programme Supervised by Dr. Gilli Bush-Bailey Royal Holloway, University of London 31 August 2008 Chapter One ‘It is not true that Drama is dying; it is true that West End Theatre is.’ (Pick, 1983, p. 177) Introduction Twenty-five years ago, John Pick pronounced a death sentence on the West End in his 1983 book The West End, Mismanagement and Snobbery, remarkably one of the few books written about this important aspect of contemporary British theatre. He went on to say: What we term ‘the West End’ will disappear as the masque disappeared and indeed it will be seen, at the end, to have somewhat resembled the masque – an expensive entertainment which, though presented in the name of general improvement, was largely a pleasant distraction for the privileged, and which at the end became jaded, drab and unwanted. (178) Writing from an avowedly Marxist position, Pick had his own reasons for making such a pronouncement. The argument he makes in this book is that the ‘present crisis’ in theatre he perceived in 1983 is fundamentally due to the fact that British theatre as a whole had been fashioned in the image of the West End – in his view an expensive, highly ritualised and inaccessible form of theatre. As far as Pick was concerned, it was time to reject this model and return to a simpler form of theatre, which in return would be both more exciting and more accessible. Yet, Pick was writing almost exactly as the defining West End theatre experience of the 1980s was in its ascendancy; the big musical spectacular. Cats opened in 1981, Starlight Express in 1984, Les Misérables in 1985 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1986. The character of the decade, both sociologically and theatrically, was to be the exact opposite of Pick’s wish - big, brash, expensive - and extremely popular. Yet, this vastly different trajectory to that projected by John Pick was not a simple success story. Over the past twenty-five years, the West End has continued to face many challenges; the economic success of major shows and the rise of key producers has not been enough to irrefutably establish the West End in the minds of the public as a valued and valuable industry, and it continues to have to fight many battles in order to ensure its survival, including tackling the charges of elitism and inaccessibility that Pick makes. This report is concerned with whether the implication of Pick’s charge still resonates in 2008, and if so, why, and how might this death sentence be reappraised? In the report I will look briefly at the history of London’s West End theatre before moving on to focus in more detail on key events of the past ten years and how those of us who are engaged with sustaining productions and audiences in the West End have arrived at a place with a very particular set of challenges for the industry. I will then go on to explore what needs to change in order for these challenges to be met, and to use the example of a recent project involving both the commercial and subsidised sectors to illustrate how thinking may have to shift in order to ensure that the West End does not just survive, but thrives throughout the next century. Setting the Scene So what do we mean by ‘the West End’ of London? To many people, it is simply synonymous with a ‘good night out’ (but not necessarily at the theatre); to others it’s a geographical designation; and to some it means the hub of commercial theatre in London. Technically speaking, in terms of the theatre industry, the West End generally refers to the professional theatre presented in approximately forty theatre buildings clustered in one square mile of London traditionally defined by Oxford Street to the north, Regent Street to the West End, The Strand to the south and Kingsway to the east. This area is often referred to as ‘Theatreland’; interestingly, Westminster Council has recently embarked on a £6 million ‘Theatreland Strategy’ to signpost it as such, suggesting that the term ‘The West End’ does not carry as much meaning beyond the theatre sector as might be supposed. The majority of the theatres in the West End date from the late Victorian or Edwardian period, meaning that many of them are now listed buildings as they feature grand neo-classical or Romanesque designs, and splendid interiors. Affection and loyalty for individual buildings as represented in the patronage of ‘Friends of…’ schemes merges with a broader attachment towards their collective identity as the quintessential ‘West End’. A Short History of the West End Theatres have stood in this area of London since the Restoration in the1660s, but the West End as we know it really emerged in the mid to late-nineteenth century. Its growth in popularity was helped in part by rapidly improving transport links between central London and the newly built suburbs, as well as the economic prosperity of the time, which was largely due to booming overseas trade. In 1900, good seats in West End theatres cost between 5s. and 10s. 6d, making it almost impossible for the working classes to access despite the fact that they had continuously populated the galleries in earlier centuries. A sense of occasion was created around the theatre visit with the largely middle and upper-classes audiences dressing as formally as they did for dinner, and managers becoming celebrities of national significance. Indeed, in 1895 Sir Henry Irving became the first British actor-manager to receive a knighthood, an endorsement of such respectability that it served to finally separate actors from the ‘rogues and vagabonds’ label which had tarnished them for centuries. There was also a growing familiarity between audiences, managers, actors and, indeed, with the plays and playwrights. Popular playwrights could and did have several plays running at any one time, safe in the knowledge that there would be sufficient audience for each. Key to the development of the West End in this period was the creation of Shaftesbury Avenue in 1886, where slums were demolished to make way for a key thoroughfare linking Piccadilly and Bloomsbury, which currently hosts six theatres. Theatres continued to be built in the early years of the twentieth century, until the carnage of the First World War took its inevitable toll, even on the theatre industry. Audiences disappeared as the wealthier classes stayed at home, and the composition of companies shifted as young men were drafted into the war, leaving young women in the majority on the stage, which in turn led to a growth in revues and musical entertainment. Finally, managements changed as the actor-managers died off and new syndicates began to buy up the venues. Competition for audiences also grew between the wars, with the emergence of cinema, radio broadcasting and a growth in provincial theatre, especially the new repertory movement which was establishing itself in many major cities throughout the UK, with the result that managements sought to shore up the notion of exclusivity and ‘high art’ as a means of securing the identity of the West End. The class conscious West End Managers who frequented the Garrick Club and other such institutions invariably refused to engage with the new producers of cinema and broadcasting, rather snobbishly suggesting that they would not associate with ‘trade’ and thus reinforcing their own ‘professional’ middle class status. In 1911 the Society of West End theatre passed a resolution which refused film producers access to theatres to film performances because it was deemed to be ‘very prejudicial to the general interests of the theatrical profession and is accordingly greatly to be deprecated.’ This was further cemented by the Theatrical Management Association at their AGM in 1923 who refused to support the broadcasting of its members’ plays, and indeed actually hoped to prevent the broadcasting of drama full stop. Yet despite this controversy and the economic recession of the 1930s (or perhaps partly because of the latter) the West End managed to maintain an aura of glamour, leading Sir John Gielgud to admit in his autobiography that for a long time his ambition was ‘to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully cut suits lounging on sofas in French window comedies’. The constraints of life during the Second World War certainly created a threat to the exclusivity and glamour of the West End. An element of liberation grew up as new, smaller companies appeared and more minimal staging emerged out of necessity. However the traditional West End style proved to be remarkably resilient, creating a period of contrasts in the development of theatre. It is an ambiguity picked up by Michael Billington, in his recent book State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, who poses the very question ‘Where does the story of post-war British theatre really begin?’ Some would claim VE Day – 8 May 1945. That was the day when a grateful nation celebrated the defeat of Nazism and street parties erupted up and down the land; but the touching image of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, fresh from their evening’s triumphs in Blithe Spirit and Perchance to Dream, joining the euphoric crowds streaming towards Buckingham Palace reminds us that the West End’s twin icons were still regally intact. He goes on to say that other claims can be made for the arrival of verse drama by the likes of T.S. Eliot and the premières of Waiting for Godot in 1955 and Look Back in Anger in 1956 as watershed moments, but it is interesting to note that as far as the West End is concerned, many of the glamorous pre-war producers, actors and ‘French window comedies’ were still very much a part of the scene for at least a decade post-war. One key post-war West End player whom it is worth discussing in some detail was Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont. Hugely successful, producer of many of the best productions of the 1940s and a shrewd political player, he was in equal parts respected and resented for his manipulation of the system and tyrannical approach to management. The nascent debate about state subsidy was increased when Beaumont created a not-for-profit educational company called Tennent Plays Ltd in order to bring his production of Macbeth (1942) to the West End. This production was partly funded by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (or CEMA, forerunner to the Arts Council), and gained exemption from Entertainment Tax as a not-for-profit company whose aim was ‘to produce plays of outstanding merit which were thought unlikely to be a commercial success.’ When the authorities started to question this rationale in 1947, he simply wound the company up. Beaumont is interesting in that he marks a bridge between the actor-managers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and the impresarios of the late-twentieth century. His ‘educational’ company is a model which has continued to be explored in one form or another ever since, as commercial theatre producers seek to find ways of countering the very high risk factors of producing shows. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter Two, one major company is currently in the process of setting up a charitable trust through which it can channel its educational endeavours, though quite how these will be defined remains inconclusive. Beaumont’s approach may be seen as typical of the elitist attitudes that Pick abhorred and arguably, its legacy is still a problem today. Key factors which presented real challenges to the West End post-war were the effects of large-scale bombing, and the subsequent scattering of the population; the straightened economic circumstances of post-war Britain which highlighted how expensive theatre was compared with other popular pursuits. The most far-reaching change was the establishment of the new Arts Council of Great Britain by Royal Charter in 1946. This presented a potential threat to the West End by creating a new focus for theatre, a new group of people who could have a great deal of influence. However, in its early days, the Arts Council’s drama panel was heavily influenced by West End luminaries or members of ‘the Group’ such as Sir Bronson Albery, Hugh Beaumont and Noël Coward, thus ensuring a slightly strange, but mutually beneficial, partnership approach. Simultaneously, the debate about a National Theatre rumbled on between 1948 to 1962, when the building scheme was finally green-lit The première of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre is generally agreed to be a seminal moment in post-war theatre and its effect on the West End has been considered revolutionary. But evidence suggests otherwise, and the gulf between West End theatre and the work of the newly subsidised companies was not necessarily as wide as we might think. It was West End manager Donald Albery who first presented Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre to British audiences, and Michael Codron who first presented Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and gave the first London showing of work by Joe Orton (again at the Arts, which at that time was a theatre club just off Leicester Square). There were many plays which moved across to subsidised theatres after a ‘commercial’ West End run and, interestingly, commercial impresario Oscar Lewenstein was one of the co-founders of the English Stage Company in 1955, highlighting how much more blurred the boundaries between subsidised and commercial interests are than has been generally thought. So, none of these changes proved too much for the West End and it proved itself remarkably chameleon-like in adapting itself to changing climates. Theatre-going in the West End even managed to regain some of the glamour it had enjoyed pre-war. In fact, it was remarkable how little ultimately changed in the West End post-1945, despite the enormous changes in society in this period and to theatre as a whole, given that 85% of the 1100 theatres that had stood in the UK in 1914 had been demolished or irretrievably altered by 1980. The opening of the National Theatre in 1976, and the Barbican in 1982 certainly did change the dynamic of London theatre. Yet in the decade immediately following both of these events, the West End enjoyed one of its most popular periods to date. The 1980s saw the spectacular rise of the popular musicals of Lord Lloyd Webber and Sir Cameron Mackintosh - successes resulting in knighthoods just as in the past. Many West End theatres were made more secure as they were bought by groups such as Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, Mackintosh’s Delfont Mackintosh Group and, from the late 1990s, the Ambassador Theatre Group. The late 1980s and early 1990s mark a further period of great change worldwide, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and subsequently the Soviet empire, the first Gulf War (and its consequent effect on tourism to the UK from the USA) and a recession in the UK. Yet the success of the big musicals continued, with Andrew Lloyd Webber having five shows of his playing in the West End simultaneously in 1993. The recreated Shakespeare’s Globe finally opened in 1997, and the tiny Donmar Warehouse began to make its mark under the Artistic Direction of Sam Mendes in the 1990s, these last two demonstrating that the success of musicals still left some room for the growth of ‘high art’. The West End Today Alongside New York’s Broadway, London’s West End is generally considered to offer the widest range and highest quality of commercial theatre in the world and seeing a West End show rates highly amongst tourist activities in London. Ian Rumgay of the website TripAdvisor said confidently ‘I think for any visitor coming to London, West End shows have definitely got to be on the schedule. The West End has something for everyone of all ages’ ( HYPERLINK "http://www.tripAdvisor.com" www.tripAdvisor.com 28/07/08). West End theatres include large, well-known houses such as the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the London Palladium as well as playhouses like The Duke of York’s on St. Martin’s Lane and the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street, and the tiny Duchess and Ambassador’s Theatres which seat a mere 895 people between them. The Society of London Theatre (SOLT), formerly known by the unfortunate acronym SWET – Society of West End Theatre – is the trade body for the whole of London theatre and was created in 1908. It is worth noting that its membership encompasses not only the major commercial houses and producers which traditionally were a part of SWET but now includes the major subsidised London theatres as well, for example, the National Theatre, the Royal Court and the Barbican, as well as commercial venues which fall outside of the traditionally defined ‘West End’, such as the Old Vic and Shakespeare’s Globe. (For a full list of theatres which comprise the membership of SOLT, please see Appendix 1.) What this membership illustrates very clearly is that the West End does not sit in isolation. It is just one part of the ecology of London theatre, albeit the dominant part in terms of both the total number of seats it collectively offers to the public, and the wider economic impact of its activity which, in 2004, was estimated to be £1.5 billion in an Arts Council commissioned report, with every audience member said to spend additionally an average of £53.77 on food, transport and childcare when they visit a West End theatre. The Big West End Players The key players remain Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group (RUG, incorporating the former Stoll Moss group) with seven theatres (the Adelphi, the Cambridge, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Her Majesty’s, the New London, the London Palladium and the Palace) despite selling off their playhouses in 2005; Delfont MacIntosh (seven theatres – Gielgud, Noel Coward, Novello, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, Queen’s and Wyndham’s) and the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG), which has come from small beginnings in the early 1990s to become the biggest theatre owner-operator in both the West End and, separately, the second biggest regionally. ATG now owns nine West End theatres - the Comedy, the Donmar Warehouse, The Duke of York’s, the Fortune, Phoenix, Piccadilly, Playhouse, Savoy, and Trafalgar Studios (two venues). Live Nation (formerly Clear Channel) owns the Dominion, Lyceum and Apollo Victoria. One relatively new player is the Nimax Group, Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer’s new venture which was established in 2005 in order to buy four of the theatres that RUG were selling. Nimax now owns five playhouses – the Apollo, the Duchess, the Garrick, the Lyric, and the Vaudeville. In addition, Theatre Royal Haymarket is a major independent player, and Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen who owns the Victoria Palace, St Martin’s and the Ambassadors. The Old Vic is run by Sally Greene and Kevin Spacey and owned by the Old Vic Theatre Trust, and the Shaftesbury by the Theatre of Comedy. The West End is due to receive its first entirely new theatre in 2008 when Cameron Mackintosh opens the Sondheim Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, the first new venue to open there since 1931. These are genuinely big players, dealing with big businesses in an increasingly competitive and commercial world and frequently operating a form of internal ‘subsidy’ whereby major musicals in their larger venues help support less profitable drama in smaller houses within the same group. Recent Reports Two major reports have been commissioned about the West End in the past decade. The first was The Wyndham Report – The Economic Impact of London’s West End Theatre, commissioned by SOLT in 1998 and written by Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. The second was Act Now! Modernising London’s Theatres, produced by the Theatres Trust in 2003. Both of these reports have had a significant impact on the industry and are therefore worth exploring in some detail in order to establish the climate in which the West End operates today. The Wyndham Report (1998) Commissioned by SOLT within the first year of the New Labour administration of the late 1990s, the Wyndham Report makes interesting reading ten years on. It remains a powerful and significant document, as it was the first time an independent, impartial report had stated the true economic impact of London’s West End on UK plc. Some of the facts and statistics it came up with remain pleasantly shocking: Phantom of the Opera has had world-wide takings of more than £1,730 million, almost double the total box office of the movie Titanic Tax payments made by West End theatres in 1997 exceeded the subsidy paid to those in receipt of such subsidies by almost £150 million. As a net currency earner for UK plc, the West End is bigger than many other major British industries, including, for example, the entire UK Film/TV and Accountancy sectors. Ancillary spending by West End theatre-goers on UK restaurants, accommodation, transport etc in 1997 was £433 million. Attendances at League football matches are one third those at West End theatres (4 million v. 11.5 million), while gate receipts are just one quarter those for the theatre (£60 million v. £246 million) In his introduction to the report, André Ptaszinski (then President of the Society of London Theatre) states that the report was intended to “make a positive, realistic start to a debate on how best to safeguard and encourage a British industry which has come to lead the world”. Arguably, this statement was very much of its time; the recent change in government after eighteen years had created a palpable feeling of optimism in many sectors, and creative industries were clearly in favour at Number 10 Downing Street, with plenty of celebrities being invited to numerous high-profile soirées. The report also precedes two significant events: the failure of the much-hyped Millennium Dome (which is referred to in the report with a sense of misplaced awe – attendances were predicted to match that of the West End, in the event they were around only 6 million) and the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11 2001, which was to have, amongst others, such a major impact on tourism from the USA. The report, however, did not just paint a picture of completely good news even in the relatively halcyon days of 1997. It pointed out that there were warning signs for the industry even then; “slowing growth, too few new productions, too few young theatre-goers and a regional theatre network which has for some time been chronically under-resourced.” It goes on to suggest four key policy areas which should be addressed by policy-makers to ensure a healthy future for the West End: Help get more new plays written and performed Invest in our theatres and theatre companies Help us to reach new audiences Simplify investment in commercial productions How successful the theatre community been in achieving these policy changes, and the impact of the report on the vital ‘debate’ referred to by Ptaszinski, will be addressed in Chapter 2. Act Now! Modernising London’s Theatres (2003) Published in 2003 the Theatres’ Trust report was aimed at highlighting the urgent need for investment into the theatre buildings of the West End. Rupert Rhymes OBE (Chairman of the Theatres’ Trust) and Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen (then President of SOLT) summarise the situation thus in their introduction: West End theatres were built for a different age and for an audience with quite different expectations … owners now face the challenge of financing a substantial programme of continuing renovation and adaptation in order to ensure that theatre-going is an even better experience for the next generation and beyond. We estimate that, in aggregate, at least £250 million at today’s prices will need to be spent over the next fifteen years or so. The report goes on to survey 40 theatres, of which 33 are listed buildings. Some key findings at the time of the survey included: 65% of theatres would benefit from more ladies toilets 48% have inadequate foyers or bars 60% have many seats from which the full height of the stage cannot be seen 24% had inadequate or no air conditioning or comfort cooling. Rather than just list these statistics, however, Act Now! also goes to some lengths to explain why theatre owners are faced with such a problem now. It highlights the fact that the majority of theatre buildings in the West End have only recently “been taken into the ownership of organisations for whom theatre provision is a fundamental part of their rationale.” This in turn has meant that they have inherited what can be up to forty years worth of neglect. The report then makes the case that such chronic under-investment over such a long period of time is impossible for theatre-owners, who have to contend with the fact that only one in ten theatre productions in the West End ever returns a profit, and the relatively low commercial return rates of even the most successful shows, to address alone. It identifies the National Lottery, specifically the Heritage Lottery Fund, the planning system and a levy on ticket sales as potential solutions, as well as praising Sir Cameron Mackintosh for his unprecedented personal investment in the West End venues he owns. It concludes however, that none of these solutions will be sufficient and a case has to made to government, pointing out that ‘The VAT on West End ticket sales alone recouped by the Treasury now amounts to over £48 million p.a., nearly three times the amount needed annually to refurbish these theatres.’ The writers of the report even went so far as to suggest that government might consider ‘outright investment’, or alternatively ‘a special initiative under the umbrella of the National Lottery’, or ‘special tax concessions’. It concludes ‘only government has the power to secure a solution’. To date, despite representations made at many levels, including to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on 1 February 2005, it has not done so. Chapter 2: Current Challenges So does Pick’s 1983 assertion that West End Theatre is ‘dying’ resonate today? Does it sound woefully misplaced, or does it retain a degree of accuracy? One thing is clear, twenty-five years on the West End is very definitely still here. The same theatres form ‘theatreland’ as they did when Pick was writing, although some have been renamed, a testament more to life than death, one would have thought. Recently, prime time television programmes have been developed which enable audiences to vote for the lead performer in the next big musical production in the West End – the BBC’s How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? for The Sound of Music initiated the trend; I’d Do Anything to find a Nancy for Oliver! (BBC), Any Dream Will Do (BBC) to find a Joseph and You’re the One That I Want (ITV) to find a Danny and Sandy for Grease swiftly followed. These television shows have not only garnered audiences in their own right, but have played a large part in contributing to record attendances in the West End as a result, and certainly go some way to challenging Pick’s criticism that the West End was, and always would be, intractably elitist. Indeed last year, the number of attendances to productions in the West End hit the highest figure on record, topping 13 million for the first time with 13,630,810 visitors - up by 10.4 per cent on 2006 - according to figures from The Society of London Theatre. Ticket revenues rose to £469,729,135, generating VAT receipts of £70 million. These figures would suggest that West End theatre is a booming industry. But they do not tell the whole story, as then SOLT President Rosemary Squire suggested in the same press release: This is obviously excellent news for the industry, for all those who work in it, and for the UK economy. The Theatre Capital of the World continues to come up with shows that the public want to see. It’s a costly business, however, putting on world-class theatre, and we’re investing more and more in productions to meet public expectations. However, for the moment, I think we can all celebrate an on-going success story. What headline figures like these don’t cover, of course, is the cost of achieving such results. As Ms Squire indicates in her comments, it is becoming more and more expensive to create shows which people will happily buy expensive tickets to see. The current record for the most expensive show to be produced in the West End is held by the recently defunct Lord of the Rings with initial production costs of £12.5 million. To give some idea of its scale, it had a cast of more than fifty actors and about ninety musicians and crew, seventeen hydraulic lifts were installed underneath the huge stage and in the props room there were about five hundred pieces of armour and one hundred and fifty weapons. Seen in this light, ticket receipts of £469 million for the entire West End begin to seem less extraordinary. There is another side to the cost of a healthy Box Office in the West End and it is one which was highlighted by Michael Billington in a significant article printed in The Guardian in August 2007 entitled ‘Crisis in the West End’. Billington states: ‘Never in my lifetime has London's West End theatre looked so narrow in its range of choices or so out of touch with contemporary reality. And it is high time the crisis was confronted and a debate launched about what we expect of commercial theatre.’ His argument is that the West End is dominated by derivative musicals, leaving no room for original musicals or plays. At the time of writing, he saw that of the twenty-six musicals then playing in the West End: 12 derive either from films or TV programmes or are compilation shows drawn from back catalogues. That leaves 14 shows that might loosely be described as "original", even if many of them are adapted from novels. And of those 14, only four hail from the current decade: Wicked (closely based on The Wizard of Oz), The Drowsy Chaperone (due to close after mysteriously ecstatic notices), Avenue Q (a lightweight American import) and The Lord of the Rings. In defiance of my critical colleagues, I happened to like the last. But the melancholy truth is that the musical as a living creative force seems to be in decline. He goes on to lament the scarcity of composers, and identifies a similarly parlous state of affairs when it comes to straight plays, of which there were just two which were not thrillers playing in August 2007 – In Celebration by David Storey and Elling, based on a cult Norwegian film. Both of these productions were star-led, by Hollywood actor Orlando Bloom and television star John Sim respectively. He acknowledges that there were also some comedies which were doing well, including the surprise hit adaptation by Patrick Barlow of The 39 Steps (produced by Fiery Angel), but there is altogether little to feel positive about in his view. For Billington, a major part of the problem is the lack of imaginative and creative producers in the West End, citing only Sonia Friedman and Matthew Byam-Shaw as bucking the trend. He also references the desperate need for investment in theatre buildings as identified by the Theatres’ Trust Act Now! Report, which I have already summarized in Chapter 1. Billington concludes ‘numbers alone cannot disguise the truth: that the West End lacks any dynamic creative initiative and is living on borrowed time, in that many of its buildings are barely fit for purpose.’ In 2007 therefore, one of the country’s leading theatre critics and author of a major recent study in post-war theatre identifies a ‘crisis’ in West End theatre. The causes may be different, but Billington essentially reaches the same conclusion as John Pick in 1983. How is it that an industry, which on the surface seems to be thriving, is so regularly and publicly seen to be in crisis? What has happened in the course of the past decade to lead to such a conclusion? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to first look at the impact of The Wyndham Report and the Act Now! Report. The Impact of the Wyndham Report (1998) The Wyndham Report is generally agreed by those who were involved in its publication as having had a transformative effect on perceptions of the West End by policy makers, the wider theatre sector and indeed from within. It is clear from my research that its findings are still regularly quoted by journalists, politicians and industry representatives ten years on from its original release. As the report identified four key areas for policy change, it seems sensible to examine whether change has indeed been achieved in these areas or not over the course of the past decade. Recommendations 1 and 2: ‘More new plays written and performed’ and ‘Invest in our Theatres and Theatre Companies’ These two aims have in fact been closely linked through policy decisions made at the turn of the century, so it makes sense to look at them simultaneously. The Boyden Report of 2000 was particularly significant in this regard. The subsidised theatre sector was in a pretty dire state prior to the change of government in 1997, as Charles Morgan reflected in a written submission to the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport in January 2005: For the last 20 years it was no secret to anyone—Government, Arts Council or particularly the theatres themselves—that public funding for theatre was inadequate and that the impoverishment of live drama had been exacerbated by the financial strictures of successive Conservative administrations in the 1980s and 1990s. There had been a succession of reports, many of them by the Arts Council itself, which identified underfunding as a major problem for the development of British theatre. The change of government therefore presented the first real opportunity for increased arts (and theatre) funding for over twenty years. Eventually, in August 1999, the Arts Council commissioned Peter Boyden Associates Ltd to undertake a review of the Roles and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres. The objectives of the brief were to undertake a survey of regional producing theatres, to identify key factors affecting structure, personnel, funding, audiences, programme and artistic aspirations, to assess current practice and demonstrate the implications for future funding policies and to analyse options for future policy and to outline their implications. The final report was published in May 2000 and directly informed the Arts Council’s further consultation period and publication, in July 2000, of the National Policy for Theatre in England, which identified eight areas of priority including ‘ a better range of high quality work’ and ‘develop the artists and creative managers of the future’. Crucially, the National Policy identified lack of funding as a key barrier to change. As a result Arts Council England argued that the sector needed an additional £25m annually. In the 2000 Spending Review ACE secured an extra £100m of Government funding. By 2003 there was an additional annual £25m of revenue support for theatre (excluding the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company), made possible by the Government’s increase in the Arts Council’s core grant, which in turn was part of what Secretary of State Chris Smith announced as the ‘best ever funding settlement for the arts - an increase of 60 per cent in real terms over a five year period.’. This represented a 72% increase in the budget for theatre, bringing grant in aid to £72m. So the first decade of the twenty-first century proved to be a time of unprecedented investment and opportunity for theatre. A great example of how this funding uplift made a real difference is at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). At the turn of the century, the centre was in grave danger of going bust. By the time of writing this report, it has acquired an extraordinary reputation for a whole host of reasons: of particular interest to this report is Jerry Springer The Opera, which originated at BAC before, extraordinarily, transferring to the National Theatre, then going on to have a commercial West End run and a national tour; other examples include Will Adamsdale’s Perrier award for his show Jackson’s Way, developed at BAC, and actor Toby Jones (who played Truman Capote in the 2006 biopic Infamous) and award-winning director Rufus Norris, who both emerged from the BAC stable in this period. By the end of 2007, BAC had gone on to co-produce The Masque of the Red Death (with company of the moment, Punchdrunk), a huge commercial and artistic success, whilst successfully fighting for its survival as Wandsworth threatened to cut its funding. All this from one small arts centre in one London borough. Similar success stories were replicated across the country, including Michael Grandage’s work at Sheffield Theatres and Birmingham Rep’s work to name but two. Success does not come without some cost, unfortunately, and the government’s later decision (some time after Chris Smith had been ousted from office) to freeze arts spending at its 2005-06 level in 2006-07 and 2007-08, is widely considered to be partly due to a belief, evidenced by stories like that of BAC, that theatre ‘had been sorted out once and for all’ by the record settlement of 2000 and the subsequent Arts Council Theatre Strategy of 2000. Of course funding has to be sustained for it to really have a transformative effect and it was therefore with surprise and relief that the arts sector greeted the Comprehensive Spending Review settlement of 2007, which had been widely expected to reduce arts spending overall, and which instead gave a 3.3% uplift to the Arts Council. The overall funding picture for subsidised theatre as whole over the past decade then, can be said, for once, to do justice to the term ‘golden age’. What difference did this ‘golden age’ of public funding for theatre make to the West End? As the Wyndham Report rightly noted, the two are heavily inter-dependent: ‘A healthy West End is good for the entire industry, just as a healthy regional theatre scene is of great importance to the continuing health of the West End’. This relationship was explored more fully in Robert Cogo-Fawcett’s 2003 report for Arts Council England, Relationships between subsidized and commercial theatre, in which he says: Developing new audiences and markets is not a preserve of the subsidized sector… this needs lively partnerships between art and commerce to provide audiences with fresh opportunities and the industry with a dialogue and dialectic in which creativity across the sectors is encouraged to grow and the symbiosis to which Wyndham refers, to develop. So it follows that the overall robust health of the subsidised sector over the past decade will have in some way contributed to the success of the West End as epitomised by the ‘best year ever’ figures produced by SOLT in January press releases every year over the same period. Some highlights include The History Boys (2004) by Alan Bennett, which enjoyed sell-out runs at the National Theatre before two further hugely successful runs in the West End and a national tour. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Spanish Golden Age season took the West End by storm in 2006, Rock ‘n’ Roll transferred from the Royal Court to the Duke of York’s to great acclaim and Elling (2007) made a great leap from the Bush to a highly successful run at the Trafalgar Studio 1. Arguably, none of these productions would have been able to open in the West End, even those by highly regarded playwrights such as Bennett and Stoppard, because the productions would have been potentially too expensive and risky for a commercial producer to take on. Elling certainly wouldn’t ever have made it to the West End without the head of steam it built up during its original run, despite its casting, and the same could be said forThat Face (2007), an award-winning first play by seventeen year old Polly Stenham, who emerged from the Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Programme to see her play produced in the Royal Court Upstairs, to win several awards including the Evening Standard award for ‘Best New Play’ and finally to see That Face transfer into the West End (produced by Sonia Friedman Productions), an extraordinary achievement by anyone’s standards. Stenham leads us neatly into the much vexed question of ‘new plays’. In the report which kick-started the whole process described above, Peter Boyden made a startling statement about new writing which immediately links the two policy areas highlighted by the Wyndham Report: Across the creative industries new writing is the key to investment and productivity. It is the primary process through which ideas are ordered as the basis for performance. There is a relative dearth of mainstream new writing capable of attracting core audiences to the main houses. Most of the young writing talent forged in the London crucible is deemed too risky for main house work in the English Regional Producing Theatres (ERPTs). The regions seem wary of second productions of plays premiered in London – making it hard to earn a living as a young writer. Financial constraints increasingly inhibit the “traditional” commitment to new writing in studio spaces. Most ERPTs can only afford to commission with the intent of producing. They therefore tend to turn to the more tried and tested writers. New talent needs to be nurtured by increasing the resources available to commission and develop work which may not make it all the way to the stage. Consequently, the Arts Council’s Theatre Strategy of 2000 identified ‘new work’ as one of its priorities for investment. The effect of this was that new writing became a buzz word; organisations which already focused on new writing such as the Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre and Paines Plough, all of which had established their new writing work over the previous decade, got major uplifts in funding, and regional theatres were charged with not only developing new plays but with identifying new writers – which in turn led to the rise of the Literary Manager in regional theatres, and a host of new writing initiatives. However, it is worth noting that provision could still be patchy and varied from region to region. The North-West, for example, flourished under a range of projects: the BBC’s Northern Exposure initiative led to some exciting partnerships with the Liverpool Everyman, Manchester’s Contact and Royal Exchange Theatres, and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Yet if you lived in the South-West of England, there was nothing comparable – a deficit which has only recently been addressed through the creation of a regional new writing network in 2007. The key issue with developing new writers and new plays is that it is a long-term game. Sarah Dickenson, from the new writing agency Writernet explains further: ‘It’s a long-term business. It takes, on average, at least five years to get someone from the point of identification as a playwright with potential to a viable commercial production.’ So, the investment made as a result of the 2000 Theatre Strategy will have taken time to yield results. This model of the subsidised sector acting as the ‘Research and Development’ arm for the commercial sector is well documented, and evidence suggests it has played a key part in the well-being of West End Theatre in recent years. An interesting, and current, example is playwright David Eldridge whose career in recent years has followed this trajectory: his first play Serving it Up (1996) was picked up by the Bush Theatre whilst he was still at university; from there, via a production at Battersea Arts Centre, he went on to work at the National Theatre Studio with Jack Bradley, then Literary Manager at the RNT. Under the Blue Sky was commissioned by the Bush, who then rejected it; instead it received its first production at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2000. His career started to segwe into the commercial sector with the adaptations of Festen for the Almeida in 2004, which went on to be produced in the West End and on tour by Bill Kenwright, and further adaptations of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (2005) and John Gabriel Borkman (2007) both for Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse. Throughout this period it should also be noted that Eldridge continued working at a real grass-roots level, connecting with a wide range of new writing theatres and involving himself in a great deal of education work. Things have now come full circle with a new commercial production of Under the Blue Sky, produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, which is currently playing with a stellar cast including Francesca Annis and Catherine Tate at the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End, and is another example of how investment in the subsidised sector yields multi-faceted success. However, new writing came off the Arts Council’s priority list with the new Policy for Theatre published in January 2007 and therefore a big question remains as to what the results of this will be. Sarah Dickenson again: I think investment in new writing over the past decade has done its job to a large extent. Now we need a re-focusing of investment. Clear pathways have been identified so access has improved, but we now need to focus on very talented people, and enable them to get their plays produced – to complete the journey and create something for an audience. Whether this will happen in the post-Olympic funding climate is another matter. When new writing is no longer a stated Arts Council priority, Grants for the Arts becomes the main potential source of funding. When the Grant for the Arts application form now asks how or if your project fits with the Cultural Olympiad, and the Cultural Olympiad has no funding attached to it (therefore making Grants for the Arts one of the only ways through which the Cultural Olympiad can be funded) it is hard to see how the mid to long-term investment needed for new writing can be sustained in the immediate future. The effect this and other Olympic-related changes may have on the West End will be discussed later in this section. Recommendation 3: Help Us Reach New Audiences The fact that Audience Development has become an accepted part of conversation in the West End over the past decade is in itself a considerable change for the better. All the major commercial theatre producers now offer some form of sustained education/audience development work in the West End, although the quantity and quality still varies significantly. SOLT has a busy and successful Development Department, which conceived and runs the extremely successful Kidsweek in the West End, now a fortnight in the summer in which thousands of tickets are given free to children when they attend the theatre with a paying adult. Ticket sales this year have already reached an astonishing 46,000 according to Emma de Souza, SOLT’s Development Manager. The Society has also run a project between November 2005 and March 2008 called The Visitor Development and Access Initiative (or Access London Theatre) which was funded by the London Development Agency (LDA) in order to achieve three key objectives: To increase audiences with sensory disabilities through the provision of more assisted performance To increase audiences of families To increase audiences aged between 18-25 This project has just published its impact report including useful findings and advice on pricing, marketing and the huge potential for development that still exists within these audience groups. Mousetrap Theatre Projects (formerly the Mousetrap Foundation) is partly funded by the long-running show The Mousetrap and SOLT’s Theatre Development Trust, primarily to provide opportunities to attend theatre for young people who could not otherwise afford to do so. It runs a series of innovative projects, which make a real difference to the challenge of forming relationships between young people in London and the West End as a whole. As Head of Creative Learning for the Ambassador Theatre Group I bring my first-hand knowledge to this section. I am the only person to be employed at Senior Management level within one of the commercial theatre groups with the sole purpose of providing engagement or educational opportunities for the community in association with our productions and theatres. We have a team of twelve people delivering this work across our regional theatres, but the challenge in the West End is very different. There is no particular sense of ownership over individual West End theatres, unlike that which exists regionally between communities and their local theatres. Productions in the theatres are frequently produced by an external producer, who may not share the same approach to the importance of audience development as your own company. The buildings themselves make it difficult to provide activities such as workshops; the bar spaces are small and inappropriate for working with children and the theatres simply do not have alternative spaces. The key way to engage theatre non-attenders, particularly young people, with the West End is through enabling them to see shows cheaply, and this too can be difficult as producers are usually loathe to reduce the price of tickets until the last minute, when it is too late to approach an educational group and organise a visit. Nonetheless, the fact that my job exists and at least one company has invested significantly in this area over the past six years suggests that producers and theatre owners do realise how important it is to create these relationships. The Ambassador Theatre Group is also about to create a charitable Trust (not entirely dissimilar to Binkie Beaumont’s scheme fifty years ago) through which it aims to fundraise specifically to increase the level of development and access work it is able to conduct in the West End. It seems to me that unless we do invest in this work with young people now, we have no right to expect them to pay what will no doubt be at least £60+ for top price tickets when they are adults in ten or twenty years time. We need to really engage people with what makes this industry special, and enable them to enjoy the unique experience of live theatre, rather than expect them to just ‘get it’ without any work on our part. Yet the limitations must be stated; any commercial organisation has to prioritise when times are tough and spending on work that doesn’t bring in any immediate profit is never appealing to accountants. This presents a real challenge to work which needs to be sustained to have any chance of success. So, good work is happening, but it is still largely marginalised and beset by the problems of short-term thinking. To really make a difference, producers need to embrace the principle of audience development in all its manifestations in their thinking from the point of planning their production, and funders need to understand that funding an educational project run by the educational arm of commercial theatre company is not an inappropriate use of public money. Recommendation 4: Simplify investment in Theatre Productions Encouraging investment in commercial theatre clearly has to remain a priority for an industry with no public subsidy. However, change in this are has been minimal. In March 2005, amended legislation as part of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 removed some of the regulatory red tape around the process of seeking investors for projects, which in turn benefited commercial theatre producers. Theatre producers were no longer forbidden from sending out promotional material for shows to potential investors without having it first approved by a solicitor or accountant. Under the original act, producers were allowed to send unauthorised promotional material to individuals earning more than £100,000 a year or with net assets of £250,000 excluding their house. However, these so-called high net worth investors first had to prove they fulfilled the financial criteria by providing certification from an employer or accountant, which could, of course, prove to be an awkward ‘ask’ at a delicate point in the relationship, particularly for new producers. However, the major change that the Wyndham Report was hoping for was to the tax system, to make it more desirable for investors to come on board. Investment in the UK film industry, for example, qualifies for 100% tax relief, a system which is seen as vital to that industry’s survival. As Lord Attenborough put it to a Select Committee in 2003: ‘There is no question whatsoever that the industry cannot succeed without some form of assistance’. It is difficult to quantify exactly what this means to the taxpayer, but a parliamentary question in 2004 elicited the information that £300 million a year alone was provided by Section 48 of the Finance (No 2) Act of 1997 (which gives to support to film productions costing under £15 million). The Treasury, however, has remained cool towards the idea that similar benefit be given to the commercial theatre industry. Complications arise from definitions; a film is an object, theatre is ephemeral. It’s also extremely difficult (impossible, the Treasury would argue) to define exactly what constitutes a commercial theatre production – should the shows presented at Stringfellow’s nightclub benefit from such relief? For the French, the Moulin Rouge is a cultural icon, but the English would probably dispute that the same could be said for Stringfellow’s. So the debate between what constitutes ‘culture’ and what constitutes ‘industry’, has largely been avoided by the powers-that-be, with the result that there have been no changes to legislation to benefit commercial theatre in this regard since 1997. _____________________ It should be added that one of the major impacts of the Wyndham Report was on Westminster Council. Richard Pulford, Chief Executive of SOLT cites it as one of the key transformative effects of the report. The report persuaded Westminster that, rather than worrying about the West End as a liability, they did in fact have stewardship over a unique resource. This revelation led in turn to the creation of the Theatreland Strategy, which has already been referred to in Chapter 1, an investment which will make a real difference to the presentation and perceptions of the West End over the coming decade. The Wyndham Report is, I have just learnt, being revisited at the moment, and we await the second version with interest. Impact of Act Now! Modernising London’s Theatres It is clear that the theatre industry had high hopes for the effect of the Act Now! Report. It makes a lucid and persuasive argument for the need for public investment in the infrastructure of the West End, given its position as London’s number one tourist attraction and the revenue (both direct and indirect) that it generates for the Treasury. The Society of London Theatre and the Theatres Trust entered into discussion with he Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the London Development Agency almost immediately after the report’s publication with the hope of securing both Lottery and Urban Regeneration funding sufficient to meet half the cost of this programme over a fifteen year period, on the basis that the industry itself would find matching funds to make up the whole £250 million. However, the outcome of these discussions was not what was foreseen. As Richard Pulford, Chief Executive of SOLT said in the Society’s Annual Report for 2006: As the year proceeded, it became increasingly clear that, for their evident goodwill towards West End theatre, the relevant bodies found that the capital demands of the 2012 Olympic Games meant that they could not commit to the industry the necessary resources for the next five years at least. Despite the goodwill too of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, she made clear her view that, in the current public expenditure climate, the industry could not expect to look to Exchequer funds as an alternative source of finance…There is no disguising the Society’s dismay at the situation. So the industry finds itself hijacked by the Olympic Games. There is a palpable sense amongst those involved in discussions that, were it not for the Games, the request may well have been successful. In the intervening period, the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, who was sympathetic to the industry’s arguments, was moved upon Gordon Brown’s appointment as Prime Minister to the new role of Olympics Minister. The Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts programme has had its funding reduced by approximately 30% in order to address the already identified gap in funding for the Olympic Games in 2012, yet nobody really knows what these Games will ultimately cost. Indeed, the current success of Team GB at the Beijing Olympics will no doubt put further pressure on the government and other funding bodies to up the levels of funding for the team, not just for the facilities, in order to ensure similar success on our home turf in four years time. It seems impossible to expect any money from the public purse until London 2012 is well and truly out of the way. Instead, the industry has had to fall back on a range of less satisfactory solutions. In January 2008, Bob Blackman AM, Deputy Chair of the Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee for the London Assembly took it upon himself to research and publish a report called Restoration Drama, further exploring the question of investment in West End theatre buildings. The report is well meaning but, in my opinion, naïve. It covers much of the same ground as Act Now!, and consulted with many of the key groups, but does not seem to have the same grip on the reality of West End theatre economics. It suggests nine potential solutions to the problem of finding the £250 million necessary to bring the theatres up to standard, including primarily a Restoration Levy to be placed on tickets as has been done in New York for a number of years now and as indeed was suggested in the Wyndham Report However, as Richard Pulford points out in SOLT’s Annual Report for 2007: It is some years since Cameron Mackintosh introduced their 75p levy on ticket sales at Delfont Mackintosh Theatres. During 2007, the Ambassador Theatre Group began rolling out a £1 levy across its theatres, and Nimax Theatres and those owned by Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen indicated an intention to the same. Useful though the levy is, however, the proceeds are unlikely to meet the need except over the very long term. Whereas major refurbishment of a 1,000 seat theatre might be expected to cost £5m-£10 million (and possibly even more) a £1 levy would produce just under £500K net of VAT in a year even assuming that every seat were sold for every performance. The report also references ‘producer contribution’ as a solution, citing Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s handsome personal investment in his seven theatres at a cost of £27.9 million as an example, when the industry has been explaining for years now that Sir Cameron is unique in this regard and it is simply not an option available to most theatre owners. Blackman also suggests public fundraising appeals and naming seats or debentures as possible avenues of exploration, but again both suggestions don’t fully recognise the differences between the West End and other theatres, such as the lack of a core audience for a particular venue and the unpredictability of content in West End theatres, as compared to the National Theatre, for example, which has full control over its programme, and which would make the idea of a debenture very risky to a potential sponsor. Blackman does suggest that others should play their part to, suggesting exemption from VAT on building improvements and extending the Mayor’s Theatre Sector Climate Change Action Plan as examples to consider. However, he makes it very clear that the latter scheme has no funding attached to it, so it may be more accurately expressed, perhaps, as an idea rather than a specific suggestion. The most sensible plea made by Bob Blackman is for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s Working Party on this issue to be reconvened without delay. It does indeed appear to be the only thing that can be done in the short-term to keep the debate alive until such time as the Olympics have passed into memory. Chapter 3: The Future It would seem, therefore, that the reality of the position in which the West End finds itself in 2008 is far more complex and multi-layered than either John Pick, Michael Billington or indeed SOLT’s ‘best year ever’ press release suggest. On the one hand we have a West End which is genuinely attracting more visitors than ever before, helped in part by innovations such as the ‘wannabe’ television series which, if they do nothing else, act as a sustained prime-time marketing campaign for the shows concerned. They also, although no data has yet been produced to support this claim, undoubtedly have helped attract new audiences, people who would not otherwise have come to the West End to see a show. Oddly, television has helped communicate the message that live theatre is special and unique experience better than the industry itself has managed to do for a long time. The West End has also been substantially supported by the unprecedented investment in the subsidised theatre sector as whole which has taken place over the past decade, which has not only created high quality shows which have transferred into West End theatres, but which has also helped develop numerous writers and actors whose potential is only just being fully realised. There has also been an indefinable ‘feel good factor’ in the theatre industry, which has in turn helped to create a sense of optimism and enthusiasm within those who work in the sector. The work itself has largely been of excellent quality, with lots of shows garnering awards and international acclaim, and there is a real sense of pride in what theatre in the UK looks and feels like in 2008. The Comprehensive Spending Review settlement of 2007 helped maintain this optimism as the widely expected cuts not only didn’t materialise, but were confounded by an unexpected uplift. However, the Olympics Games are too much in our minds at the moment to be able to ignore for long. Whilst the hope is that London will provide an extraordinary Games of which we can all be proud, the reality is that this means tough times for the arts sector. When the government department is named ‘Culture, Media and Sport’ and the sport part is going to be of such unprecedented prominence for a period of over seven years, it is impossible to see how culture and media can avoid being over-shadowed by their rapacious sibling. Reinstating the Cultural Olympiad was part of why London’s bid to host the Games was successful but the reality is proving to be less persuasive to those who work in culture. With no funding attached to it, no opportunity to use the word ‘Olympics’ to brand an event or project, no real sense of how one might actually involve one’s organisation in the Cultural Olympiad, and the raiding of Grant for the Arts to fund the Olympics as a whole, it is no wonder that artists do not feel as thrilled as they are told they should by Jude Kelly about the coming festival. In fact, so serious were the concerns that in May 2007, a joint letter to Gordon Brown was written by Equity, Bectu, the Musicians’ Union, the Theatrical Management Association (TMA), Dance UK, the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA) and the Independent Theatre Council, which stated: All our organisations supported the Olympics bid. At the time, we had no reason to suppose that the net cost of the Games would fall disproportionately on the performing arts and other elements of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport budget (DCMS). If it should indeed do so, it would be both illogical and profoundly discouraging to everyone in the cultural sector. Whether in your last few weeks as chancellor or in your new role as prime minister, we urge you to address these concerns as a matter of urgency. NCA director Louise de Winter said government claims that the arts would be paid back once land and buildings were sold off after the Olympics were wishful thinking and that the money taken from the Lottery needed to be made up this year in the CSR. “The sector needs this money now, not least because how on earth they expect us to run any kind of Cultural Olympiad when we don’t have a properly funded sector, I don’t know,” she said. And it’s not just these difficulties. The reality of hosting the Olympic Games in London will have a massive impact on the West End. We have been often told that during the Olympic Games in Sydney, the Opera House saw its attendances shoot up. But Sydney is very different to London. In London you have a choice of many, many world-class cultural institutions: the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre, The Royal Opera House, Tate Modern, the British Museum, the National Gallery – the list is endless, before one even puts the West End in the picture. Many of these places are free, and if you are coming to London at what will be an extremely expensive time to see the Olympics, it does not follow that the same people will come flocking to the West End, happy to pay top price for a ticket to a musical. In fact, it seems highly unlikely, certainly in the numbers required to fill all 40+ auditoria every night. Equally, those who do love theatre more than sport are likely to avoid August 2012 as a time to visit the city, so it is really difficult to see how the Games will be beneficial in anything other than a long-term sense of raising London’s profile and, we hope, putting on a great show which reflects our many strengths and assets, not just our sporting prowess. However, it was fascinating to note that the eight minute segment of the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony which was London’s ‘invitation’ to the world for 2012 featured the arts very prominently (Nicola Benedetti, The Royal Ballet and CandoCo were all participants) and the first performance of the handover party in London on the same day was given by the cast of We Will Rock You, literally bringing the West End centre stage with the Olympics. It will be interesting to see what effect the success of Beijing and the increased optimism about London 2012 will have on the city as a whole, and the desire of industries to play their part. Maybe Beijing and Team GB’s success will help assuage some of the cynicism and propel the city as whole into a new determination to present the ‘best show on earth’ in every sense in 2012? Which brings us back to the buildings. If London 2012 does increase the tourism figures to the city during the year following the Games as has been suggested by both Sydney’s and Athens’ experience, then the theatres will be even less well able to cope than they are now. If it was argued convincingly in 2003 that the majority of West End theatres were no longer fit for purpose, then what will they look and feel like to audiences in 2013? There is a curious synergy here; one of the key reasons why the industry has been unsuccessful in securing public funds to help its cause in this regard was because London won the Olympics, yet it is precisely the promise of the Olympics which makes the cause even more pressing. London will have all eyes on it in 2012, and yet one its key assets – the unique fusion that is West End theatre – will still be in dire need of investment and unable to bear the scrutiny. It will be like turning up to the smartest party of your life dressed in ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes that have been badly and repeatedly darned and patched. It will be terribly embarrassing. But it would be wrong to think that the threats to the West End simply come from outside. Within the industry itself, there are challenges which are much more within its control. To begin with, the West End is not good at communicating itself to the outside world. There are two instances discussed in my report which highlight this: the Wyndham Report clearly had an absolutely revelatory impact and arguably, it should not have done. Did it really take the West End until 1998 to muster enough facts and figures together to show what a difference it made to the national economy? Similarly, the effect of the show-related television series clearly shows that when people are encouraged to have some ownership over a show, they are happy to buy tickets – whether they were theatre-attenders or not. Clearly, it would be unhelpful and inappropriate to suggest that every theatre production creates a television spin-off, but the point I make is a broader one. It is about the importance of engagement, and arguably the West End has been slack in this regard, expecting its audiences just to come to it, rather than communicating with them in any meaningful sense. This is beginning to be addressed through increased audience development work but as I said earlier in this chapter, it is still not taken seriously enough by the industry as whole. And taking it seriously means putting money towards it, from a variety of sources but including from producers’ and theatre owners’ pockets. West End managers and producers are also not good enough at giving consistent messages. To return to Michael Billington’s article, the thrust of which was that too many of the shows presented in West End theatres are derivative, unoriginal and ‘narrow in its range of choices’, there is one irrefutable answer: strictly speaking, the only job of West End theatre producers is to make money. There is no obligation on them to produce certain types of shows, or to produce a range of shows. Certainly they have a duty to produce work of quality to justify the ticket prices, but other than that there is no other requirement placed on them. Theatre-goers in London, we mustn’t forget, don’t just have the choice of the commercial West End theatres, they can also choose between the three auditoria at the National Theatre, the Bush, the Young Vic, the Lyric Hammersmith, the Almeida – again, the list goes on. There are also several prominent outer London theatres which host ‘number one’ tours and pre-West End shows such as Richmond Theatre and, a little further out, the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford and the Chichester Festival Theatre, which have both had many productions transfer to the West End. So the overall mix remains good as long as those subsidised or off-West End theatres produce plays and not exclusively musicals. It therefore seems peculiar that the West End is not more confident in refuting such criticism as unjustified. The ‘heyday’ in the West End, which is often referred to by critics who lament the rise of the musical, actually refers to a completely different era when many of these other theatres simply didn’t exist. Furthermore, according to SOLT’s annual report for 2007, there were 108 commercially presented plays available to the theatre-goer, as compared with a total of 45 musicals. The final area which the industry has evidently failed to communicate, despite the best efforts of SOLT, is the case for public investment in theatre buildings. There is still divided opinion even within the commercial theatre sector as to the validity of the argument, which seems extraordinary given the persuasiveness of both the Wyndham report and Act Now! Bob Blackman’s report frequently mentions the London Development Agency’s need to see evidence of ‘market failure’ before they would consider helping to fund a commercial theatre building in any way; once again it appears that the argument has not been heard. Yet it is perhaps only to be expected of a sector where the main proponents are constantly in competition with one another that concord and mutuality does not come naturally. Nonetheless, the shared interests of the sector need to be supported by more than just the officers at SOLT. Joined up thinking is not anti-commercial. It just takes a more long-term view of things, in just the same way as a belief in the value of audience development for the West End does. The commercial West End could be much better at it. There are of course factors which are beyond (almost) anyone’s control. The horrific terrorist attacks on London in July 2005 certainly impacted on attendances at West End theatre and if anything similar were to happen in future, it would almost certainly have a negative effect on tourism and consequently on our industry, just as the IRA attacks of the 1970s and 1980s had a profound effect on people’s perceptions of London for a long while after the events themselves. Equally, the imminent recession towards which we find ourselves heading at the time of writing is likely to have a proportional impact too, if history is anything to go by. ‘There is strong evidence to suggest that, after a time lag, the ups and downs of the theatre economy reflect the ups and downs of the economy at large’. But enormous as these challenges may turn out to be, it may also be that the biggest challenges ultimately lie closer to home. What the West End really needs to ensure its survival are people who are prepared to produce shows, and people who want to spend money to come and see them. The West End desperately needs people who are prepared to take on the hard and largely unrewarding graft of raising money and risking it on a show, in the full knowledge that only one in ten commercial productions will make a profit for its investors. It also needs to think more imaginatively about how it brings in new audiences, and Richard Pulford of SOLT suggests that needs to be done most urgently through ticket pricing. Whilst the West End is frequently criticised for its top price tickets, he argues that it is the bottom end of the scale to which we should be paying more attention. When a highly desirable product goes on sale at £60 a ticket top price, as Acorn Antiques The Musical (2005) did, those tickets sell out first. But to pay £20+ for a ticket where you can’t see most of the stage, is unacceptable – and furthermore, gives people at that ‘entry level’ an experience they won’t want to repeat. If that ticket had been £10, it’s less of a problem and the whole experience has a different feel to it. Charging a lot of money for a sub-standard ticket is not only immoral, but actively works against all the audience development work that many people are trying so hard to develop. So why do producers so steadfastly refuse to look at the lower end of their pricing in imaginative ways? It’s partly the question of investors. If you have fought hard for many years to build up a portfolio of investors who trust you, and for whom you are ultimately trying to make money, it is extremely difficult to explain to them why you want to offer low price tickets for this incredible show you have just been selling them. It is also true to say that the West End is slow to change; producers like to stick to what they know because they bear the risk that comes from changing, which makes the sector intrinsically risk averse. As the West End is accountable to no-one other than its investors (generally speaking) it is not used to asking difficult questions of itself or, indeed, of listening to the opinions of others, particularly outsiders. And a risk averse, inward-looking culture also risks lacking in innovation and getting left behind. I said in Chapter One that I would reappraise John Pick’s assertion that ‘It is not true that Drama us dying; it is true that West End Theatre is’ in light of what I had discovered. It seems to me that his statement could not have been more wrong, both then and now. The West End is instead, I believe, in a process of evolution - and like all evolutions it is slow and difficult and inevitably creates a few casualties along the way. But what has been created in the twenty-five years since Pick wrote that statement is a West End which is more robust, canny and open-minded – and therefore more fit for survival in the twenty-first century. It is a West End which has at least tried to seize the day in commissioning some major studies into its work and impact, which I believe will continue to have ramifications for many years to come. Results have not come in overnight, but if the industry maintains its confidence in the simple facts of its arguments, the time will come when solutions will be found. The West End will soon look and feel better as you walk through it, as Westminster’s Theatreland Strategy is fully realised, and this will in some way temporarily compensate for the fact that many of the interiors of the theatres still need much work. The success of the remounted or derivative musical which made Michael Billington despair is at least acting as a great PR campaign for the West End, and attracting new, often younger theatre-goers. This in turn will help create a climate which is more conducive to younger producers; their business will remain hugely risky but the attraction of the potential to have the next big hit on your hands should not be underestimated. And imagination does have its place in the West End, contrary to what Billington suggested in his article. The forthcoming residency of the Donmar Warehouse at the Wyndham Theatre during the autumn of 2008, attracting such luminaries as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Kenneth Branagh is an example of how a small venue with big ideas is working with a major theatre owner to create something very different for the West End; Sam Mendes’ transatlantic Bridge Project, developed by Mendes’s Neal Street Productions, aims to link London’s Old Vic with New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) through a series of co-productions featuring a single British/American company. The inaugural year’s double bill – Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in a new version by Tom Stoppard, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale – plays first at BAM from January to March 2009, followed by international residencies in Singapore, New Zealand, Spain and Germany, before arriving at the Old Vic to play in repertoire from May to August 2009. And the Ambassador Theatre Group should be credited for its 2005 transformation of the Whitehall Theatre into the Trafalgar Studios, two venues which feel very different to the traditional West End and which have attracted a noticeably different and younger audience to some innovative and exciting shows. Ways Forward I would like at this point to mention a project which also sheds light on changing attitudes within the sector. Metamorphosis 08 was an Arts Council funded project which took place over the course of a year at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, one of the Ambassador Theatre Group’s venues. It was the first time that Arts Council London had given a substantial sum of money (in this case £77K) to a project led by a commercial partner. The project was a new writing project, aimed at finding new plays from the South East London boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham. After a long period of community outreach work and dramaturgical development of short-listed plays, two plays were taken to full production in June 2008, and presented in a specially built 200 seat studio theatre which was built entirely on the Churchill’s vast stage. The project’s aims were to enable the theatre, as the only major arts organisation in London’s largest borough, to present work which it could not normally do, to attract a new audience to a venue which would feel very different through the transformation pf the stage space and performer-audience relationship, and to produce two excellent new plays. The project succeeded on all these counts and has been considered to be a successful partnership by the Arts Council. What is even more interesting is that one of the plays has been picked up by Soho Theatre and will be co-produced by the Churchill Theatre (on behalf of the Ambassador Theatre Group) with Soho Theatre in October 2008, a fascinating outcome on many counts. The reason I cite the project, for which I was a producer, is because it seems to me to illustrate some of the changing opportunities that exist at the moment. I had spent nearly ten years trying to form a relationship with the Arts Council, but this was previously impossible as my organisation’s commercial status meant that we just didn’t register on the radar. This has now changed and I have been told directly by the Arts Council that Metamorphosis 08 has been seen as a positive pilot scheme which has encouraged them to genuinely consider working with the commercial theatre sector more in future. The validation given to the project by Soho Theatre’s interest in the production should not be under-estimated here. This surprising partnership has also created an exciting collaboration between the West End and off-West End, and there are some great audience developments opportunities which will come from it in terms of bringing younger people into the West End (particularly from outer London, where the play is set), and in exchanging information on audiences with venues like the Trafalgar Studios, to the benefit of both. It has also meant that a young and talented creative team have got direct experience of working within the commercial sector (during the first phase of the project in Bromley) and commercial theatre producers have been able to work with what was, effectively, a subsidised project. The learning curve has been a steep one on all counts, but it is certainly true to say that all of us will be better equipped as a result, and more likely to make a success of our next producing venture – perhaps in the West End. The project cannot make any money for ATG because the Soho has relatively few seats (c. 140) but it is heartening to think that it has endorsed the resulting co-production for all of the reasons given above. The ‘value added’ goes beyond mere box office receipts in this case. It demonstrates some of the open-mindedness and creative thinking, as well as helping to create new producers, that I believe will be so necessary for the West End to thrive in coming years A West End which is more confident in its own unique abilities and strengths will be best placed to deal with those the range of challenges I have identified above and, by and large, I think the West End is confident. Perhaps the biggest challenge will be to make the best of everything; Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s investment in his venues could make other theatre owners despondent, or it could benefit them through the excellent publicity the openings of the venues will no doubt attract. Do theatre-goers really check out which venue a hit show is playing in before they buy tickets? On the whole, they don’t, so the aging buildings are perhaps not such a deterrent as we might fear. In addition, a sense that things are changing for the better created by Mackintosh’s investment in the West End may have a positive effect on the whole. Full blown economic recession will impact on the West End, but a short-term credit crunch may leave people happy to spend on a treat such as going to see a show instead of going on an expensive holiday, or buying a new car. Or at the very least, perhaps that is what we should be telling them? The Olympics present a whole host of challenges to the arts sector as a whole, but it is undoubtedly also an opportunity, even if the precise nature of this opportunity Is not quite clear as yet (and you can be sure that the intrinsically entrepreneurial nature of the West End will be sure not to miss such an opportunity when it does present itself). The West End is also blessed with some great young talent, in all sectors. Increased investment in the development of industry technical skills through the work of Creative and Cultural Skills (the Sector Skills Council for the performing arts) and the establishment of a course for new commercial theatre producers by Stage One during the past decade will both help the industry help itself. But for all that the West End presents difficulties to government, industry bodies, and the public, it is impossible to imagine the heart of London without it; it would become little more than a big shopping centre, just like all the others across the country. The West End is great value for the UK; most of the risk in presenting its shows and managing its buildings is taken by private individuals, whilst UK plc gets to benefit economically in myriad ways from its success. The West End also contributes to the international reputation of London, and of the UK as a cultural powerhouse, something which will be of great importance as we move away from our manufacturing past to a future based on the strengths of the creative industries. So, perhaps it may be true to say that the version of the West End that Pick saw in 1983 is dead. He described it as ‘an expensive entertainment presented in the name of general improvement … jaded, drab and unwanted’. The audiences who have recently come to see The Sound of Music, Grease and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat are not, I would suggest, coming in the ‘name of general improvement’. They are instead coming to have a good night out, and to see the end result of a process with which, in these instances, they feel some involvement. The buildings themselves may be a little ‘jaded’ and ‘drab’ on the inside but the quality of the shows presented soon overcomes this for most people; and the staggering attendance figures of over 13 million for the last year certainly refute the idea that the West End is ‘unwanted’. I see the West End as a uniquely vibrant cultural quarter, one that should be enriched by its history, and not afraid of it. If the West End can embrace the lived experience of the past (the ‘good night out’ and the culturally challenging plays) and connect that experience with the present, there is no reason why it should not thrive in the coming years. There need be no mutual exclusion between creating big shows backed by major investment and boundary-breaking smaller pieces. The West End can and should do both, but achieving this takes risk and vision. The recent history of the West End suggests to me that this vision is there, and so risks will be taken, and confidence will grow as a result, leading in turn to the proper sustaining of a unique cultural asset of which we can all be proud. Appendix 1 Full list of the membership of the Society of London Theatre, 2008 Almeida, Adelphi, Aldwych, Apollo, Apollo Victoria, Barbican, Bush Cambridge, Comedy, Criterion, Dominion, Donmar Warehouse, Drury Lane (Theatre Royal), Duchess, Duke of York’s, Fortune, Garrick, Gielgud, Greenwich, Hackney Empire, Hammersmith Apollo, Hampstead, Haymarket (Theatre Royal), Her Majesty’s, London Coliseum, London Palladium, Lyceum, Lyric, New Ambassadors, New London, New Wimbledon, Noel Coward, Novello, Open Air Regents Park, Palace, Peacock, Piccadilly, Playhouse, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, Queen’s, Royal Court, Royal National Theatre, Royal Opera House, St Martin’s, Sadler’s Wells, Savoy, Shakespeare’s Globe, Shaftesbury, Soho, The Old Vic, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Trafalgar Studios, Tricycle UCL Bloombsury, Unicorn, Vaudeville, Victoria Palace, Wyndham’s, Young Vic Bibliography Act Now! Modernising London’s Theatres, A Report by the Theatres Trust, London, 2003 After Wyndham: Key Issues in London Theatre, SOLT, November 1999 Arts Council England Assessment of English Theatre with particular reference to the impact of the 2000 Theatre Review, ACE, 2008 Arts Council England Theatre Policy 2000, ACE, 2000 Arts Council England Theatre Strategy 2000, ACE, 2000 Bergan, Ronald, The Great Theatres of London, Multimedia Books, London, 1987 Billington, Michael, Crisis in the West End, The Guardian, August 2 2007 Billington, Michael, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 2007 Blackman, Bob, Restoration Drama, Greater London Authority, 2008 Brockett, Oscar J. and Hildy, Franklin J., History of Theatre, Allyn an Bacon, 9th Edition, 2002 Cogo-Fawcett, Robert, Relationships between subisidised and commercial theatre sectors, ACE, London, 2003 Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Fifth Report of Session 2004-05 Theatre, submitted by SOLT and TMA, 1 February 2005 Davis, Jim and Emeljanow, Victor, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840-1880, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2001 Huggett, Richard, Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre 1933-1973, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1989 Inside the Games, Arts Leaders Write to Brown over Olympic Raid, 24 May 2007 Kennedy, Maev, TV Reality Shows Pack Theatres, The Guardian, January 18 2008 McIntosh, Genista, Review of Arts Council England’s regularly funded organizations investment strategy 2007-08: Lessons Learned, ACE London, 2008. Pick, John, West End: Mismanagement and Snobbery, City Arts Series, 1983 Platt, Len, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage 1890-1939, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 Pleasing Audiences, SOLT Annual Report 2007 Roose-Evans, James, London Theatre from the Globe to the National, Phaidon, Oxford, 1977 Schloch, Richard W., Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Shellard, Dominic, Economic Impact Study of UK Theatre, ACE, London, April 2004 Shenton, Mark, Playing Ball in the West End, The Stage, June 5 2008 Smith, Chris, Why the Culture Department Must Stay Separate, The Independent, 10 March 2001 The Sound of Musicals, SOLT Annual Report 2006 The West End Theatre Audience, A Research Study Conducted for SOLT by MORI, 2004 Taylor, Paul, Lessons in Love: David Eldridge is back with a play about the tangled sex lives of teachers, The Independent, 17 July 2008 Travers, Tony, The Wyndham Report: The Economic Impact of London’s West End Theatre, SOLT, 1998 Tynan, Kenneth, Theatre Writings ed. Dominic Shellard, Nick Hern Books, London, 2007 With thanks to Sarah Dickenson, Genista McIntosh, Derek Nicholls and Richard Pulford, who all gave their time to be interviewed for this essay. Thanks also to Gilli Bush-Bailey for expert guidance and enthusiasm for the subject matter. J.Pick, p 100 The alternative entertainment for the working classes became the music hall, until they too were appropriated by the middle classes in the early part of the twentieth century. More detailed information on the history of the West End can be found in the History of Theatre by Oscar J. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy (Allyn and Bacon, 9th ed. 2002), Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean by Richard W. Schoch (CUP, 1998) and Musical Comedy on the West End Stage 1890-1939 by Len Platt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) J. Pick, p. 121 J. Gielgud, An Actor and his Time, London: Penguin,, 1981, p.65 cited by J.Pick p. 130. Billington, p. 5 ‘Tennant Plays Ltd v Commissioners of Inland Revenue’, 1947 For more on Beaumont, see Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre 1933-73 by Richard Huggett (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd 1989) It should be noted that the first suggestion for a National Theatre dated back to 1848, and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was frequently referred to as the ‘national theatre’. Act Now! Modernising London’s Theatres, ed. Rosy Runciman, London: Theatres Trust, 2003, p.10 Dominic Shellard, ‘Economic Impact Study of UK Theatre’ Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 2004 The Wyndham report, 22 ibid, 12 The Wyndham Report, p. 7 ibid. p. 9 ibid p. 25 The Wyndham Report, p. 3 New Labour was very interested in the idea of ‘Cool Britannia’ and opened the doors of Number 10 Downing Street to celebrities including Liam Gallagher and Meg Mathews, Sting, and the artist Tracy Emin. ibid, p. 4 Act Now! Introduction p. 3 ibid, p. 10 Act Now! p. 24 SOLT Press Release 18.01.08 SOLT Press Release 18.01.08 Lord of the Rings played at Theatre Royal Drury Lane between June 2007 and July 2008, and was produced by independent producer Kevin Wallace. Source, The Guardian, Friday 23 June 2006 Chris Smith, writing in The Independent, 10 March 2001 Source, Theatre Assessment Brief and Impact Assessment, Arts Council England, 2008 Grandage’s production of The Tempest starring Derek Jacobi transferred to the Old Vic in 2002 and Lindsey Posner’s production of The Birthday Party transferred from Birmingham Rep to the Duchess in 2005. As coined by Tony Blair in his one speech on the arts given at Tate Modern in March 2007. Wyndham Report, Society of London Theatre, 1998 Peter Boyden Associates, Roles and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres, 4.1.4 Interviewed by the author, 13.8.08 Hansard, 8 March 2004, col. 1233 SOLT Annual Report 2006 Pleasing Audiences, The Report of the Society of London Theatre 2007, p. 4 Letter to Gordon Brown, May 2007 Quoted by Inside the Games website, 24 May 2007 SOLT Annual Report 2007, p. 2 SOLT Annual Report 2007, p. 2 Indeed such practices resulted in riots, most famously in 1808 when Covent Garden reopened its newly rebuilt and expanded theatre but lower paying audiences found they couldn’t see from the upper galleries. 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