The high cost of (some) live theatre

About that Guardian editorial...

The Guardian has a new editorial up about how the price of a theatre ticket in London is too darn high. I imagine it would be possible to write a similar piece about theatre in any big North American city as well. But it makes some questionable claims and assumptions, so, here we go…

“Theatre’s in a perilous state. My wife went the other day, it cost her nearly £200 – who could afford that?” asked the actor David Harewood.

Well, for a start … your wife? Not to be (too) flippant about this, but a necessary condition for any presenter charging nearly £200 is that there are some people who can afford it and will actually pay it.

Though a survey by The Stage newspaper revealed that top prices for West End shows appear to be stabilising, with a 0.4% rise last year compared with a 20% surge in 2022 from pre‑pandemic levels, that still leaves the most expensive tickets averaging £141.37. Some popular shows cost nearly three times as much.

But if our concern here is equity and access to live theatre, and I cannot stress this enough, the top prices, the most expensive prices, are not our concern. In fact, it is the existence of those expensive top prices that enable the theatre to have seats that are not so expensive. If there are some people, like David Harwood’s wife, who will pay nearly £200 for a seat, let them, welcome them. They are necessary to cover the costs of theatre - price discrimination is essential in this business.

More worrying, for anyone concerned about access for young people and low earners (which means most workers in the entertainment industries), was a disproportionate hike in the cheapest tickets. These considerably outpaced inflation, rising by 12.8% to an average of £25.44.

Again, I would take care in how prices are reported. I did a quick search online for live theatre around London, and there are many options to see quality live theatre at less than £25.44. Will you see Mark Rylance on stage in these productions? No. But we cannot judge prices by what it costs to see the elite performers in the West End. That set of tickets is necessarily going to be very scarce, and you can’t just say “let’s make all ticket prices £10” without causing an absolutely chaotic excess demand.

In this unequal context, a decision by the producers of an upcoming production, Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play, to make 30 tickets for each show available on a pay-what-you can basis, offers a limited but welcome corrective. They have also included two Black Out performances, designed to allow an “all-black-identifying audience” to watch the play – a challenging exploration of race and sexuality – “free from the white gaze”.

The Black Out concept is not new to the UK. Since Harris introduced it on Broadway in 2019, it has been picked up by a couple of London theatres, much to the fury of the rightwing press. Now Downing Street has weighed in with its own condemnation. These performances challenge the existing demographics of the theatre which, pretty much wherever you look in the UK, are predominantly white. But they also offer an interesting thought experiment. Those who complain that it is discriminatory – despite the abundance of regular performances – might bear in mind the market forces that last year, in the West End of London, piled all the inflationary pain on the most affordable tickets.

Having some tickets that are pay-what-you-can is fine. But a major production will need to sell some tickets too, and having high-end prices for high-end seats enables the provision of some pay-what-you-can tickets.

As for Black Out, I don’t react with fury or condemnation, but I might ask whether this is a very strategic way to shift the existing demographics of theatre, and whether this sort of separation of audiences by race is in any way a helpful direction to take. I cannot see how it could be.