Youth I do adore thee – but not at expense of older theatregoers
Director urges venues to embrace all ages and not to rush into ‘an embarrassing quest’ for young audiences
THE THEATRE world must stop shaming older audiences in an embarrassing quest for the holy grail of youth, the former director of the Globe has said.
Dominic Dromgoole, who has founded a new company, Classic Spring, said the industry must stop dismissing mature theatregoers, warning it would end up “horribly” skewed if directors and producers concentrated only on luring younger audiences.
Condemning the “offensive” way older audiences are now dismissed, he said it was essential for theatre to treasure all audiences and make them feel welcome. Dromgoole, who left the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in 2016 after 10 years, has launched his first season: a year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde in the West End. The season contains one family show based on Wilde’s fairy tales, designed for audiences aged five and over. But asked at a press conference where theatre was going wrong in attracting the young, the director said people in the business could “overpush” the case for youth.
“If you scream and shout and worry about it too much you can end up skewing the theatre horribly with everyone putting baseball caps on and trying to act trendier than they are,” Dromgoole said.
“You hear people talking about what is the regular theatre-going audience in such offensive terms, saying that they’re nearly dead or have given up. And you think well, no. It’s very troublesome territory when you make one audience better than another. All audiences, whether they’re young or not, we want them all to come to the theatre.”
Claiming there “seems to be a natural tendency” for people to drift towards theatre as they grow up, Dromgoole added that the 21st century was not unique in having a more mature audience. “If you go back 2,500 years to ancient Athens, I don’t think the young people were all tearing along to see Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides,” he said. “I think they had better things to do: they wanted to go and hang out and drink and snog each other. So I think it was hard getting them in then.”
The key to attracting the young, he said, was affordable ticket prices, which have been rolled out successfully across London and elsewhere. His Wilde season will have 20,000 tickets priced at under £20.
Dromgoole did not single out any theatre or director for criticism, but his words follow years of discussion about how to win young audiences to replace current fans as they age. Theatres have been criticised for casting actors from television shows in leading roles in an apparent bid to win younger audiences.
‘All audiences, whether they are young or not, we want them all to come to the theatre’
Speaking of the need to make the West End affordable, Robert Icke, the theatre director, said last month: “Theatre has a big problem with younger audiences. The industry’s going to have to address it because otherwise we’re dead. In 50 or 60 years, there will be no audience.”
While in charge of the Old Vic in 2012, Kevin Spacey said: “What happens when this generation that is currently going to the theatre passes on to the great theatre in the sky? Who is going to replace them?”
Dominic Dromgoole, former director of The Globe, says the theatre world must stop shaming older patrons in its endless quest for younger audiences. Even the youth of Ancient Greece, he argues, probably “had better things to do” than go and see Aeschylus’s latest.
Indeed, the young may not be presently into the arts, but they probably will be when they grow up. When they do, it would be a tragedy if they walked into the theatre to discover that it has been ruined by dumbing down. An obnoxiously trendy production is unlikely to attract the young, but it will put off the mature.
And in this age of controversial television shows such as Poldark and SS-GB, the theatre has one advantage that older audiences love and should be cultivated: the best stage actors don’t mumble.