Simon Jenkins: Never underestimate the ‘power of live’ on the London stage

Has London reached peak theatre? On Saturday night I enjoyed my third West End revival of the month, Tom Stoppard’s dazzling Travesties, at the Apollo. Tom Hollander’s starring role is surely the performance of the year but the rest of the cast were gabbling their lines, as if frantic to get on to their next play as the run ends this week. The theatre was, of course, packed and ecstatic.

London theatre attendances plateaued last year at 14 million, after rising by a third since the turn of the century. Plays were two per cent up, musicals two per cent down but the latter may be partly due to a number of theatres closing temporarily for rebuilding.

What is clearly the case is that theatre-land continues strong, for all the woes that thespians incant whenever a particular audience tails off or some cut is threatened to a grant. The London stage, like London’s football, has never been so popular and profitable.

I can recall when the Evening Standard theatre listings page stuck at 40 venues. Commercial theatre seemed doomed. Producers were claiming that plays with casts of more than three actors, such as by Shakespeare, would never be staged outside the subsidised sector. Yet London this week has more than 180 venues performing some sort of live drama, almost all of it unsubsidised and with casts of six or more.

The reason is simple. Audiences will pay good money to see a good play, including in the historic West End theatres whose listing for preservation remains conservation’s most lucrative boon to tourism. Their owners are not philanthropists but hard-nosed entrepreneurs.

The market is responding in other ways. Nicholas Hytner’s 900-seat venture, The Bridge, is about to open in the “Fosterland” wilderness opposite the Tower of London. It will test the thesis that a talented director can conjure an audience anywhere — witness Peter Gill’s former Hammersmith Riverside. Hytner is not alone. New theatres are springing up like towers of luxury flats. In the pipeline are the Nimax, replacing the old Astoria, a new Sondheim theatre, a rebuilt Victoria Palace, a new Rose in Southwark and a new Sadler’s Wells, bravely located in the Orwellian horror that is Stratford’s Olympicopolis.

In addition, studio and pub theatres come and go by the week and appear in no statistics. Prime among these are such irrepressible pop-ups as the King’s Cross Theatre and Found 111, both currently looking for somewhere, I hope, fashionably grim to show their wares. Almost all these ventures, including Hytner’s, are privately financed. Like theatres of old, they depend on their wits and the quality of their work to survive, and survive they do.

Many of the new London theatres have contrived to insert themselves into the rhythm of the property boom. Giant developments at Victoria and Tottenham Court Road were required as “planning gain” to save or replace auditoriums on their sites. A theatre is a sort of church, hallowing the land on which it sits by its very presence.

Hytner will not have paid full market rate for his theatre. It is the way in which Berkeley Homes gained permission for the block of £1 million flats that sits atop the theatre at One Tower Bridge. Almost every new development concocts some corporate euphemism for “theatre” in its planning application or prospectus. The Malaysian investment “village” that is Battersea power station promotes itself with “nine curated entertainment platforms”. Queen’s Wharf in Hammersmith is to have “a vibrant arts hub”. Twickenham’s Brewery Gate comes with an appealing 320-seat theatre. To the luxury market, “vibrant creativity” is what salesmen call the “amenity of choice”, presumably after the pool, the wine cellar and the gym.

The gimmick of cramming in culture to dazzle planners into permitting more outrageous developments has had a chequered history. Who remembers the Mermaid or the Cochrane theatres? The Shaw now belongs to a hotel and the Peacock to LSE. Theatres need personalities of their own rather than lending a dollop of glamour to a property speculation.

Nor is their usually spartan design much help. As Sir Peter Hall wailed when the National Theatre was moved from the Old Vic, traditional London theatre-goers like their plays with a dose of cherubs and velvet.

The Arts Council has said it is cutting back on London subsidies in favour of the provinces, where the fate of local theatres is now dire. When London gets between twice and five times more per head than any other part of Britain, it is hard for Londoners to protest. But one day theatre rents will rise. Ticket prices will soar even higher than the current West End average of £43. The supply of new seats may yet outstrip demand. The plateau may turn into a slide.

We shall see. We should never under-estimate the “power of live”. It is cinemas and television that are struggling at present. Not only theatres but operas, concerts, ballet, comedy, even debates and lectures — any human interaction between stage and audience — seem to draw today’s crowds. And if there is one industry that shows no signs of tailing off, it is tourism, both domestic and overseas, which supplies 45 per cent of the London theatre market.

Ever since Gus, Eliot’s theatre cat, the London stage has thought itself “certainly not what it was”. But anyone who worried that the battered haunts of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Strand, with their ancient drapes and terrible loos, could not survive the new century should have seen them on Saturday night. Such was the pedestrian crush that I almost felt sorry for the traffic. The show goes on, as ever.