High-profile screen actors have suddenly been popping up in unlikely places. There’s a reason: the long-running, only recently resolved strikes by Hollywood’s actors’ and writers’ unions. With nothing being made, screen performers have been unable to work. As the months ground on, they understandably began asking themselves what they could do with time on their hands and no income. Why not go back to theatre?
That’s why Freddie Fox is spending Christmas in a smart update of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer at Richmond’s 180-seat Orange Tree Theatre. And it’s why Andrew Scott – a first-rate stage actor who shot to fame as Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock and the “hot priest” in Fleabag – did five weeks playing every character in Vanya, a revamp of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, at the Duke of York’s theatre in the West End. And now comes Dominic West playing longshoreman Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in the 126-seat Ustinov Studio in Bath’s Theatre Royal.
So far, so good. Except that, not content with working in the West Country, West has taken the opportunity to take a pot-shot at the West End.
In an interview last week, he said: “You get a lot of tourists in London and people are not necessarily there because they want to be there… it is because it is part of the tourist trail.”
Oh, really? Well, in terms of some statistics, he’s not wrong. In the annual survey undertaken by the Society of London Theatre, the most recent figures for 2022 reveal a bounce-back, with attendance at theatre performances at roughly 16.4m, a more than 7% increase on 2019 and the highest figure ever reported.
Meanwhile, the latest data from VisitBritain shows that almost 9% of all international visitors to Great Britain visited the theatre at least once during their stay, including 15% of visitors to London, a higher percentage than for any other type of cultural event. The same research showed that attending theatre was a key driver for why 15% of holidaymakers chose to visit the UK. And that doesn’t include UK theatregoers visiting the capital.
And what’s wrong with that? Are tourists lesser theatregoers? Is coming into London and taking in the pulse-quickening joy of Crazy for You or the theatrical wizardry of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child somehow invalid? Both shows hold audiences rapt.
Instead of sneering at commercial theatre, might West not consider that it pays the wages of his colleagues, not least those of Lindsay Posner, whose production of Michael Frayn’s masterpiece farce Noises Off is now at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, after one run at the Phoenix, and who is, um, West’s director on A View from the Bridge?
Where is West getting his information about the quality of audience attention? His last West End run was playing the title role in a revival of Simon Gray’s play Butley – also directed by Posner – and that was back in 2011. His last London stage appearance was what might be called West End-adjacent, since it was at the 251-seat Donmar Warehouse in a 2015 revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Given that it starred both him and Janet McTeer for just eight weeks, tickets will have been grabbed so quickly by committed theatregoers that tourists wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting in.
A strong production in a noted studio theatre in Bath is obviously a different proposition to the West End. But claiming its superiority over other forms of theatre is, at best, foolish. Just as cinema needs blockbusters like Barbie to keep the industry afloat to allow for smaller, independent film, so theatre thrives when its ecology supports both small- and large-scale work.
Or is he saying that London theatre being angled at tourists means that we are being starved of more serious theatre? That notion has been levelled at it for years. “The bare fact is that, apart from revivals and imports, there is nothing in the London theatre that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes.” Thus spake the critic Kenneth Tynan. In the Observer. In 1954.
But if West is unconsciously echoing that, he should look more closely at the current menu. The RSC is at the Garrick, while the Prince Edward Theatre is hosting the transfer of James Graham’s National Theatre smash Dear England, an exhilarating state-of-the-nation drama masquerading as a play about football. Sam Mendes, scarcely an intellectual slouch, is at the Noël Coward directing another NT transfer, The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thorne’s award-winning play about the true power of theatre. So much for the notion that the West End is the province of the brain-dead.
Even if you discount those so-called “serious” plays, what’s wrong with first-rate work devoted entirely to audience pleasure? West would do well to concentrate more on giving Bath theatregoers satisfying work and less on pouring scorn on others in – and supportive of – the industry.
• David Benedict is the London theatre critic of Variety and weekly columnist for the Stage
