Just a stage it’s going through?
London theatre scene confronts a younger generation
LONDON — A playgoer desperate to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child shells out $12,000 for a single ticket.
Benedict Cumberbatch shows up outside the stage door of the theatre where he’s playing Hamlet, and pleads with fans to stop filming him during his “to be or not to be” soliloquy.
And at a recent major revival of Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century classic, Dr. Faustus, traditional theatregoers are appalled at the presence of fellow audience members noisily consuming Chicken McNuggets while watching Game of Thrones star Kit Harington in the title role.
This is the face of London theatre in the new millennium, and the old guard doesn’t like what’s happening. And yes, it’s the ubiquitous cellphone that first started altering the landscape.
Kevin Spacey won headlines (and audience applause) during a performance at the Old Vic when he angrily told the owner of a ringing mobile, “If you don’t answer that, I will!” And the late, great Richard Griffiths once ordered an offending member of the audience to leave the theatre after his mobile went off for the sixth time.
Mobiles continue to be the bane of live performances, but increasingly they’re merely the tip of the iceberg — and in any event some audience members now consider it their right to keep them turned on, just as they see it as their right to chatter, heckle, take photographs and videos and eat whatever food they want. Furthermore, considering what they’ve paid for a ticket, shouldn’t they be entitled to behave as though they’re in their own living room?
So right now, London’s renowned West End theatre scene is going through some kind of seismic shift, which some see as disaster, while others see it as a welcome expansion of the audience base — even though, as Britain’s New Statesman recently suggested, the current debate represents a form of class warfare. Various factors are at play. One is that the Society of London Theatres continues to report steadily increasing attendance figures despite the fact that ticket prices have risen astronomically.
Then there is the controversial use of celebrity casting. Cast somebody famous in a well-known play, and you take in pots of money, even though the end result may be disappointing artistically. So you get David Tennant playing Richard II, Jude Law as Henry V and Martin Freeman as Richard III — with financially lucrative results.
“It’s win-win-win,” columnist Caroline Crampton wrote in the New Statesman. “It’s also why there is now a class war going on in our theatres. The likes of Tennant, Freeman and Cumberbatch attract a new audience, often young, not that well-off, and unabashed about their excitement at seeing their chosen star.”
Crampton says seasoned theatregoers sees this crowd as a “cultural threat.” Furthermore, these youngsters do “strange things, such as share their thoughts about the play on social media and clap after the scenes they enjoy most.”
That’s why the recent run of Dr. Faustus created such a commotion. The casting of Harington, who plays Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, triggered some inevitable fan frenzy at the dignified Duke of York Theatre. And this in turn sparked outrage from traditionalists.
London producer Richard Jordan was horrified when he attended a performance. In an interview with the influential publication, The Stage, he charged that television audiences were being lured to West End theatres by star casting and behaving inappropriately. Jordan accused them of talking, eating noisily and using their mobile phones — and of being resentful when other playgoers asked them to stop.
“A couple saw nothing wrong in producing from their bag a box of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and a large side of fries,” Jordan harrumphed “Munching seemed to be the order of the day. The couple on my left ate their way through a large tub of popcorn in act one, while the couple on my right chomped through a packet of (potato chips). It was like listening to eating in Dolby stereo, and at the expense of being able to properly hear the lines spoken on stage.”
But Harington has defended his young fans, saying these kinds of criticisms could kill theatre. And unlike Cumberbatch, who was driven frantic by picture-taking fans during his 2015 run in Hamlet, he now accepts such practices as part of the territory.
“I am afraid that, if the theatre is going to die of anything, it will be from exactly this type of stereotyping and prejudice aimed towards a new and younger generation of theatregoers,” Harington told the Guardian newspaper. He admitted that the taking of photographs — which continues to be prohibited in live theatre — is now a fact of life that “unfortunately cannot be avoided in any audience anywhere today.” But he loved his young audiences, finding them “hugely enthusiastic, energized and responsive.”
But did the Doctor Faustus run represent an extreme situation? Others in the theatre community argue that young people do respect tradition. For example, when Daniel Radcliffe starred at the National Theatre in Bernard Shaw’s long and cerebral Man and Superman, the many young people buying tickets behaved “perfectly well,” the show’s casting director said.
Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd, the controversial director of Doctor Faustus, has condemned spiralling ticket costs in London’s West End, saying some producers use celebrity casting as an excuse for exorbitant prices. Lloyd wants to widen London theatre’s audience base to include the kind of young playgoers who flocked to Doctor Faustus, but he says soaring costs are driving a wedge between rich and poor.
Informed playgoers can still find bargains — for example at at the reduced-price booth in Leicester Square operated by the Society of London Theatres. But the upward spiral is still staggering. Top seats at The Book Of Mormon now go for $400. When The Producers was selling out 10 years ago, the best seats in the house went for under $100.