Theatre
Shaftesbury Avenue and 45th Street By BAMBER GASCOIGNE WHEN Garrick was managing the Drury Lane in the mid- eighteenth century, the conventional run for a new play was nine nights. In the modern Drury Lane there have been only nine first nights since the war, and My Fair Lady glides this evening through its one thousand five hundred and eighty-first performance. My Fair Lady holds many records—at least twice as many people, for example, will have seen it in four years at Drury Lane as have seen The Mousetrap in ten at the Ambassadors—but it may also re- present a breakthrough of a more sinister kind. It was, I believe, the first show for which black market tickets became a familiar phenomenon, being advertised in the Times at grossly inflated prices; and it was the first show for which the entire theatre was sometimes bought on ordinary weekday evenings by charity organisations which then sold the tickets for large sums of money, a system which could be described as sanctified black market. It may go down in theatre history as the show which introduced the business methods of Broadway to the West End.
In New York people accept the fact that you may have to pay anything up to 40 or 50 dollars to see a hit show unless you book months in advance. The accredited ticket agencies don't themselves charge these prices, but they usually admit to knowing a little man round the corner from whom they might be able to het something. Whether they always resist the temptation to slip him tickets of their own is anyone's guess. Meanwhile tickets for the unsuccessful shows are being touted round at less than cost price. These market figures intensify the news of a 'hit' or a 'flop,' and the result is that every show is pushed firmly into one or other extreme cate- gory. There are no near-successes on Broadway.
Various forces combine to create this situa- tion. Any theatre-going public has a tendency to flock sheep-like to the fashionable show, but in America this tendency is exaggerated by the existence of vast theatre-party organisations which play a far larger part in theatrical economics than our coach parties here. The madames who run these organisations, and who can sometimes fill a theatre for several nights with their clients, are extremely powerful figures. It is hard to assess how harmful their influence is on the material which is presented; one of them did find that there were limits to her power when she demanded that the name of Arthur Miller's play should be changed before its Broad- way opening to Life of a Salesman, on the grounds that she couldn't possibly bring her ladies to anything with death in the title.
The theatre parties are vital to the Broadway impresarios, who use more high-powered sales techniques than ours and put great effort into building up vast advance bookings, thus ensur- ing a considerable ruwegardless of the notices. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song opened with two million dollars in the till, and even The World of Suzie Wong, by the compara- tively unknown Paul Osborn, had advance bookings of 750,000 dollars. After the theatre parties the next most important section of the Broadway audience is probably the businessmen who are entertaining clients on their expense accounts. Their need to get seats in a hurry and their virtual indifference to the price contribute largely to the spiralling cost of tickets. And their taste is no more likely than that of the death-shy ladies to be a cultural force for the good.
Hardly anyone will maintain that the Broad- way theatre is in a healthy state. Since the late Forties, when Williams and Miller seemed to be introducing a new age of mature American drama, what new playwrights has Broadway produced? William Inge? William Gibson? Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, who have each dramatised one of their novels? Even Jack Gelber's solitary and over- praised play, The Connection, was discovered and presented by an off-Broadway management. The most sure-fire shows are the ne•,v musical comedies by the established author-composer teams, and to young writers Broadway looks like a closed shop where only the already anointed darlings of the box-office can work. Nor is the resulting split between the commercial theatre of Broadway and the art theatre of 'off- Broadway' as attractive a solution as it might seem. The trouble is that most of the off- Broadway artists would much rather be on it— where the money is.
How long will it be before the West End fol- lows Broadway's lead into the realms of big business and the hard sell? We usually take up every new commercial idea, from super- markets to 'built-in obsolescence,' about five or ten years after America. The ticket touts are now in business here, as My Fair Lady proved; the sweet smell of success magnifies year by year the appeal of The Mousetrap, so that by a logical extension its run need never end providing the birth-rate keeps pace; theatre parties here have been known recently to occupy almost the whole house; and our businessmen seem to be noticing more and more how much a good show impresses a client. What, then, stands between the West End and Broadway?
If any one man has the answer, it is Peter Cadbury. Mr. Cadbury bought Keith Prowse eight years ago and has since added three other large ticket agencies; he now controls between six and seven hundred branch offices throughout the country and does 70 per cent. of the agency business for the West End. Only a fixed service charge, arranged by a gentleman's agreement between him and the theatre managers, is added to the price of the seats; and Mr. Cadbury assured me last week that no firm of his would ever sell tickets at inflated prices. To do so, he feels, would be to fail completely in his re- sponsibility both to the public and to the theatre managers, though there is, it seems, no legal reason which would prevent him from charging whatever he likes. Admittedly the good will of the public is important and the good will of the managers vital, since they could refuse to sell -him tickets. But whatever the American public may feel about the agencies they continue to buy the tickets, and the most sinister recent rumour from Broadway is that some of the managers have now struck up a bargain with the agencies whereby they get a cut of the excess profits from black market sales. If this is true, it would ultimately benefit the managers to sell no tickets through the box office and to build up, with the help of the agencies, a huge impres- sion of scarcity and therefore a huge demand. There would then be no one to object to a steady spiral of black market prices, except per- haps the few non-millionaires without expense accounts. And they could go to the movies.
I am not suggesting this as a likely version of Shaftesbury Avenue 1970, but 1 am suggesting that the alarming Broadway trend may already be with us. Peter Cadbury himself sees the twelve charity performances of My Fair Lady as a dangerous precedent which has given people the idea that you can see an ordinary performance of a hit show simply by paying a very high price for your seat. Mr. Cadbury will no doubt stick to his principles and will not exploit these new possibilities, but anyone taking over the vast organisation which he has created might be less scrupulous. After all, isn't Keith Prowse's slogan 'You want the best seats, we have them'? And we all know what that can mean in a free enterprise society.
Most people connected with the business side of the British theatre tend to ridicule the sug• gestion that tickets might ever be sold here at free-market prices. But is it really so unlikely, or even illogical? All goods that are perishable
'Hullo! Monica Roberts must be blackleggingf
or scarce fluctuate in price according to supply and demand, whether they be rare books, fashionable paintings, fruit and flowers in or out of season, or grouse after August the Twelfth; and a ticket for a seat in a theatre is the most perishable commodity there is—worth its full value half an hour before curtain up and nothing three hours later. By every Yogic theatre tickets should be sold at free-market prices. Therefore by every logic there should also be, between the present West End situation and its possible future, some legal barrier which is stronger than a gentleman's agreement and more irrefutable than the argument, old chap, that 'business just isn't done 'that way in England.'
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