The topsy turvy economics of the West End

WELL, London Theatre has served up another week of perfectly (and brazenly) packaged PR.

Like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express, but for Avanti passengers.

Leave it to SOLT (Society of London Theatre) to come up with the only thing more awful than West End Live – wheeling out their third press release in a week, they hit back at criticism of ticket prices and claimed that only one in every 400 tickets is sold for more than £250.

By way of recap, this was in response to a survey revealing that top ticket prices for West End shows have increased by 5% year on year, while the lowest-priced tickets surged by 24%.

I’ve spent the morning crunching the numbers for five of the biggest musicals and plays in town. I can tell you it’s exasperating.

Transaction fees, restoration levies, priority boarding, packages, lotteries, TodayTix and Day Seats make trying to work out average tickets a totally futile exercise.

It’s almost as if it is all so deeply unregulated and murky so that people can capitalise and make as much money as possible. Without scrutiny.

Here’s why. Take Giant. The Olivier award-winning play is excellent, but there are now standing tickets currently on sale in two tiers for £15 and £25. Would you pay to stand at the back of the cramped upper circle of the Harold Pinter Theatre (hotter than Greece) for 3 hours?

Insanely, there are also plenty of £424 tickets available via Today Tix. Who is regulating this? Where is this money going?

The answer is nobody wants us to know.

Patrick Gracey, a theatre producer who is often put out to defend stupid prices and, of course, a board member of SOLT, wrote in The Stage that producers needed the flexibility to vary prices — and have higher ones at peak times for popular shows — in order to reinvest in the industry and to provide a “range of affordable [ticket] options”.

Gracey says that ticket prices must rise. He proposes raising the face value of a limited number of top-price tickets to secure fair pay for creatives, while protecting affordable pricing at the lower end.

I do not want to read another article by Gracey in The Stage gaslighting audiences. Anyway, Australia is cracking down on dynamic pricing and hidden fees in concerts and cultural events. If they can do it, why can’t we?

This really is one of those issues where there’s a passionate reaction from the public that something is beyond the pale.

In other words, reaching a solution isn’t straightforward. However, acknowledging the need for a conversation about the unregulated secondary market, the fact that a prominent theatre owner runs a ticketing arm, the involvement of a leading west end producer in an investment bank, and the exclusion of working-class and middle-class communities would be a positive step.

Unless you engender a habit of theatregoing with for starter the middle class, you will endanger theatre and future audiences.

It is urgent. And I won’t shut up about it.