Is this the end of the line for overpriced tickets?

I did not actually utter the words ‘Do you know who I am?’, but they hung in the air

FOR an entire day earlier this week, a good friend of mine watched icons on his computer screen move at glacial pace as he attempted, unsuccessfully in the end, to buy tickets for a rugby match.

As I would have been the fortunate recipient of the other one, had he been successful, I was kept abreast of the process, which happened to follow my learning of another friend’s attempt to secure tickets for Hollywood star Cate Blanchett’s debut on the stage of London’s National Theatre.

Previewing from this week, Blanchett is appearing in a new adaptation of the 18th-century epistolary novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson – an inky printer turned writer over 300 years before that become a phenomenon in more enlightened corners of labour relations in British journalism.

The play, entitled When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, has

been made by Martin Crimp, whose own original work, adaptations of classic stage texts and librettos for the operas of George Benjamin would have made the piece worth seeing no matter who was in it.

In fact Blanchett’s co-star is Stephan Dillane and the play is directed by Katie Mitchell, whose stellar theatre and opera directing career includes the recent staging of Marguerite Duras’ La Maladie de la Mort which was performed at last year’s Edinburgh Festival.

This show is, understandably, a hot ticket and the business of securing one that entitles you to a seat to watch it is a complex business, involving registering for a ballot, being given a time when you are allowed to attempt to connect with the box office and then being fortunate enough to get through.

Then you still have to pay the money, of course, with preview tickets peaking at £37 and those for the run hitting £58 on Fridays and Saturdays, which is certainly less than you might be asked to fork out for a commercial West End hit.

Of course, we writers of reviews are in the blessedly fortunate position of being admitted to performances free of charge, but are we grateful? Not always. I confess to a minor tantrum this week because of the introduction of an impersonal level of registration and form-filling to cover this year’s Celtic Connections, which I have been writing about since it began, but whose automated machinery was not, of course, in any position to know that.

My frustration (I did not actually utter the words “Do you know who I am?”, but they hung in the air) was only what less privileged arts and sport lovers have to thole all the time, as ticketing increasingly moves online even as the price of tickets soars, and the extra charges added to them for an undetectable level of “service” increase.

None of which is news, although it was interesting to hear Regular Music’s Mark Mackie, whom I interviewed in last Saturday’s Herald Magazine, talk about the era of mailbags and postal orders that was the way things worked in the 1980s.

Perhaps it is the atmosphere generated by the inexplicable waste of time, money and energy that history will surely come to see in this week’s political events, but I wonder if this a bubble waiting to burst?

The inflated prices for entertainment, as well as the public willingness to scrabble for tickets, will not survive any economic collapse. And the recent boom in the appetite for live entertainment, which in music is predicated on free access to the recorded form thanks to new technology, is probably not going to last forever.

Predicting what comes next is always a fool’s errand, but how we who can afford it consume our arts and entertainment, and how and how much we choose to pay, will assuredly undergo further transformation. The organisations best placed to weather those changes will be the ones that look after their loyal fans and customers now.