Stage directions
Kenneth Hurren
The Set-Up: An Anatomy of the English Theatre Today Ronald Hayman (Eyre Methuen £4.00) If I'm not careful (and it's touch and go) I'll find myself reviewing the book Ronald Hayman didn't write. That one is called The Season, which was actually written by William Goldman (and published only, I think, in America), and ever since I encountered it and its fiendishly frank analysis of the Broadway theatre about four years ago, I have
dreamed the impossible dream that someone would attempt the same engaging caper with
our own. It is my private disappointment that The Set-Up isn't it, although here and there it loiters on similar territory. Here, for instance, is Goldman on theatrical finance:
Let's say our musical runs a year and loses half of its $500,000 investment. So the producer gets no profit piece. But for the 52 weeks of the run, he has got $500 a week for office expenses and that's $26,000. Let's assume that over the entire year our musical does three-quarters of capacity, which is reasonable, and let's put capacity at $100,000 a week, which is reasonable too. That brings in another $39,000, making a total of $65,000 for the producer while the show is losing $250,000 ... If a guy can luck into enough flops like that, he can retire.
And here is Hayman in a related area:
The system of fixing a level below which box-office takings must not fall is liable to be abused. A producer may have reasons for wanting to keep a show running at a loss and he cannot be stopped from buying up tickets himself to make up the takings to the required level ...
The Hayman paragraph goes on revealingly, and indeed the whole chapter (one dealing with the West End 'commercial' theatre) puts together a great many facts and figures that will be new and eye-opening to most readers, but you will notice, perhaps, a difference in approach that is not wholly identified in Goldman's stylistic vivacity. It is indicated further in some of the two authors' chapter headings. Thus Goldman: 'The Muscle,' 'Homosexuals,' Washing Garbage', 'Corruption in the Theatre.' And thus Hayman: 'The Actor's Motives,' The Regions versus London,' 'The Fringe,' Culture and the Arts Council.'
From which it can be seen that Hayman has written an altogether different book. (I would not say a more serious book, but certainly, as might be expected of a man whose contributions so regularly grace the arts page of the Times, a more earnest, not to say primmer, book.) A less wayward and more relevant comparison would be with Richard Findlater's The Unholy Trade (1952), which The Set-Up brings factually and statistically up to date. I am grateful for that, and the book is welcome on my reference shelf for the mass of carefully researched information it provides. Hayman is at his best when he allows this factual information to speak for itself — as in the chapter on agents, in which he had to let it speak for itself, for if he'd added the comments that I suspect were on the tip of his pen he'd be collecting writs by now.
With no such restraint imposed upon him in most other areas, he is always handy with an opinionated judgement, lacing the comments into the facts so tightly that it is often troublingly hard to sort out the one from the other. Since a straight catalogue of facts would scarcely make lively reading, this complaint is probably captious. It is also highly prejudiced, since almost every time Hayman ventures to 'interpret' a fact, his interpretation seems to me wrong-headed. I am thus bound to observe, a touch sniffily, that the subtitle of his book does not go out of its way to alert the reader to what he is up to: anatomists may make scientific deductions from their dissections, but they are wary of leaping to tendentious conclusions. "The Institute of Contemporary Arts," writes Hayman, "has done disappointingly little for Fringe theatre," and even though, at that point, I'd read some 200 pages with their dubious adjectival infiltrations, that 'disappointingly' still gave me pause.
Though facts provide the main value of the book, they are only secondary in its purpose and are not allowed to inhibit its arguments. Sometimes, though, the author cannot conceal his dejection that they should so betray him. Thus, while on page 24, "the epicentre of the new working-class movement was the Royal Court," on page 308:
A depressing constant in English audience surveys is the high level of educational and occupational status. A survey of the audience at the Royal Court indicated that about 40 per cent of those who were not still students were university graduates.
One fact I had not appreciated is that 100 years ago the best West End stalls cost ten shillings while today, lagging far behind the price-rise in everything else, they usually cost only five times as much (less than seven times as much at the most: the £3.30 at Gypsy). The logical, though unpopular, conclusion to be drawn from this is that seat prices should go up to a more realistic figure so that West End managements could 'pursue a more adventurous policy. Hayman's conclusion is that they should be subsidised.
It is not a conclusion that will surprise anyone who reads The Set-Up, for Hayman's answer to nearly everything is more and more state subsidy. He thinks the Royal Court was doing better work in the 'fifties under George Devine with a subsidy of £5,000 a year than it is now with more than £100,000 a year. Nevertheless, it should be increased. The National Theatre should get more, the Royal Shake§peare Company should get more, and even — nay, for heaven's sake, especially — the Fringe should get more. On the evidence offered, I doubt whether many will be persuaded of the case for this solution to the theatre's problems; but if you are, I hope you can afford it.
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