Where to start with the curious topic of dynamic pricing, which – without wishing to speculate on spoilers – I suggest you formally label as “developing”?

Guess what a premium seat for Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium costs on Friday night. Gird your loins. £225. Could they be cheaper? Almost certainly.

There are, of course, day seats, a weekly lottery — and commendably £20 tickets for 16-30 year olds.

But Hello, Dolly! ticket prices go up and down throughout the week — more times than Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s chopper landing at his 2,000-acre Somerset estate, that includes two dairy farms with 700 grazing cows.

‘Theatre’s excellence comes at a price,’ as Mackintosh said a few years ago. Well, now.

Indeed, there has been significant public backlash on £3-400 theatre tickets in the West End a number of times now.

But they’re still doing it because they think that it works in the very short term. Yet in the long term, it really, really doesn’t – which makes doing it anyway pretty criminal in itself.

A quick recap: dynamic pricing is not a new phenomenon and is allowed under consumer protection laws, it is used a lot in theatre, and it is often not clear when it is happening and when it isn’t.

In fact, dynamic pricing often acts as a rationing device. In case you are not familiar with the model, it is not dissimilar to that used by airlines, hotels and some taxi services. 

I thought this graphic summed things up neatly: there’s virtually no profit in cheap anything. Like British Airways.

However, it has drawn comparisons to ticket touting, where ticket prices are massively marked up by a secondary seller to capitialise on high demand.

Essentially, it is the mechanism to allow the markets to achieve equilibrium.

Hundreds of Oasis fans have made official complaints about how tickets for the band’s reunion tour were advertised. Cost of concert tickets jumped by hundreds of pounds during online sale because of this problematic pricing system.

Ticketmaster says the goal of the dynamic pricing system is to “give fans fair and safe access to the tickets, while enabling artists and other people involved in staging live events to price tickets closer to their true market value”.

What absolute rubbish. At a time when around half of people on low-income benefits ran out of food last month, dynamic pricing is a self serving racket.

Is supply and demand the best regulator?

Incidentally, shares in TicketMaster’s parent Live Nation Entertainment are untroubled. It has bigger worries: the US Department of Justice in May filed a civil antitrust lawsuit alleging anti-competitive practices, which Live Nation has rejected.

In a statement on Sunday night, culture secretary Lisa Nandy said it had been “depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans from having a chance of enjoying their favourite band live”. 

Nandy said the government would include “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queueing systems which incentivise it, in our forthcoming consultation on consumer protections for ticket resales”.

Elsewhere, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told BBC Radio 5 Live that the issue was “really important because this isn’t just an Oasis problem, this is a problem for all sorts of events.” 

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Tuesday it was “urgently reviewing” the use of dynamic pricing after Oasis fans criticised the “scandalous” inflation of ticket costs.

A spokesperson for the regulator said: “Consumer protection law requires businesses to be fair and transparent in their dealings with consumers, and businesses must give clear and accurate information about the price people have to pay. Failure to do so may breach the law.”

Good. I am glad that this is getting front page coverage. (Incidentally, while I have been typing this, I note that a new play heading to London’s West End in 2025 will chart the animosity between Oasis and Blur.)

Of similar concern is the recent depressing research from Norwich Theatre that highlighted general theatregoing habits: around one in four Brits have never been to the theatre.

Theatre is very much a habit, and one that can be lost as soon as we leave school and if your child is lucky, an annual trip to the local pantomime – especially with the continuing cost of living crisis.

I’m not crazy about the fact that the Stage’s recent annual survey of West End prices, which focuses on the most expensive tickets found that the average top ticket price for plays rose a whopping 50% in the past year, from £94.45 in 2023 to £141.61. 

These prices are keeping Theatre elite. And ATG (Ambassador’s Theatre Group) have a disproportionate amount of control over the West End. 

Moreover, new research from the National Youth Theatre and Netflix highlights the fact that majority (89%) of working class parents don’t want their child to pursue a creative career – revealing the shocking extent of the “class chasm” in the creative sector – and its impact on attitudes towards creative careers. 

To combat this, they have launched year two of IGNITE Your Creativity to break down barriers for young people from the West Midlands, North East and London who want to work in film and TV.

Obviously, having limited seats for people for whom price is not an issue and time is, subsidising producer’s ability to keep prices down elsewhere. I get it. 

And with that, transparency from producers on the costs may go some way to dispel the perception of unfairness.

Anyway, I’ve been to Hello, Dolly! four times. If I’m honest, it has got me through one of the worst years of my life. But these joyful experiences – life-defining in my case – need the people, places and spaces to carry them.

That is why I am determined to strongly argue for fairer ticket prices to live theatre, for access for audiences that are more representative of the diverse society that we live in, especially now.

I’ll hope you’ll join me.