Ensemble Theatre Group

With so much content beaming freely across the web, consumers have never had such unfettered access to entertainment. Dilating bandwiths have meant data transfers have shrunk to infinitesimal speeds and, as entire fleets of pirate P2P websites and media data streamers career off all over the place, the notion of actually paying for entertainment is quickly becoming rather odious.

With a West End theatre seat costing you easily in excess of 20GBP, the economic future of live drama is looking decidedly well, shaky. Pair this with the increasing dependence that West End shows have on celebrity and many have forecasted murky waters ahead.

Matt Wolf from the Guardian describes the recent Hollywood invasion of the West End as the “visiting celebrity cavalcade” come to rescue the dwindling audiences dribbling through the gate. A few years ago, Sheriden Morley described in the New York Times how the influx of celebrity had “turned London audiences, once the best and most perceptive in the world, into mindless stargazers.”

Pretty stern stuff isn’t it? But then, that might not be the whole story. After all, can we really declare that traditional theatre has lost its bite?

It certainly hadn’t just over ten years ago, when Sarah Kane’s Blasted premiered at the Royal Court. The fury that splashed over the front pages of nearly every national newspaper the next morning was burnt into the mind of anyone that dared to assume that theatre had lost its power to shock. The violence in the play is no worse than is found in the tamest of Tarantino flicks so why the outrage?

Quite simply, in the cinema, on television or on DVD, the action happens elsewhere, in a shifting world behind a screen. In the theatre, the action is right in front of you; you can hear it, feel it and, if you were really so inclined, you could reach out and touch it. You can watch actors enact the most brutal or intimate scenes on hi-res plasma screens anywhere, but only in the theatre can they watch you right back.

What’s more, It might not just be the available ‘experience’ that saddles defiantly in theatre’s corner. Theatre, it seems, has quietly started embedding itself within popular culture. Although slightly fewer than its predecessors, Ofcom insists that the BBC’s hunt to cast a new West End version of Oliver!, “I’d Do Anything”, steadily attracts over 5 million viewers. Match this with the recent crop of copycat shows like “Hairspray: The School Musical”, which is currently preparing to air on SkyOne, and it may look like there’s fight in the old girl yet.

To many, theatre may not seem like the most viable economic prospect; who would want to pay for entertainment when they can get huge budget content streamed to their home for next to nothing? But then that may be the whole point, where as ‘content’ can be zipped, transfered and then unzipped at any computer the world over, theatre cannot.

Theatre will be affected by technological advances, of course it will, and it may need to change in order to progress, but it cannot be trampled over by the digital stampede because it is a totally different entertainment animal. Streamers may supersede television schedules and force licence fee funded institutions into remission, but it cannot replace what it cannot do to begin with. Theatre is temporal, magical, immediate, personal and not, under any circumstances, available to download.

westendtheatre.com rounds up what looks hot in London theatre in 2009

If theatre mirrors life then you would expect 2009 to be a bad year for the performing arts in London: economic downturns and credit crunches sound like gloomy news for our discretionary entertainment spending. But West End theatre box office figures have kept on going up in recent years, and the huge number of new productions sailing into town during 2009 could mean that Theatreland manages to buck the trend.

THE GREAT REVIVAL

The RSC, National Theatre, Donmar and Old Vic dominated straight drama in the West End in 2008, and they haven’t finished yet. Big hitters coming to town include Judi Dench in the Donmar in the West End’s Madame de Sade at the Wyndhams; Jude Law offering us his, hopefully fighting fit, Hamlet; Gillian Anderson in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Donmar Warehouse; and a number of crowd-pleasing revivals at the Old Vic, no more so than Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s hugely successful play starring Andrea Corr, and Sam Mendes directing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, both featuring Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack.

STAR POWER

Other stars shimmying into town include Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket, Ken Stott in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s, heavy-hitter Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear at the Young Vic, and Antony Sher giving us his Prospero in the RSC’s The Tempest. The Gavin and Stacey phenomenon continues to roll on, as we see Joe Orton’s delicious romp Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Trafalgar Studios starring Gavin himself, Matthew Horne, alongside Imelda Staunton; whilst Gavin’s onscreen Mum Alison Steadman plays a barking Leeds housewife in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at the Gielgud Theatre.

NEW PLAYS

The sharp eyed amongst you will notice that all of these plays are revivals rather than new work, keeping audiences firmly in their comfort zones. That said, new plays may be thin on the ground but not absent all together, with the National offering up Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, following two lovers across four centuries, and Samuel Adamson’s Mrs Affleck set in the 1950s. Jez Butterworth has two new plays in pre-production, with comedy Parlour Song at the Almeida and Jerusalem at the Royal Court. Also at the Royal Court, Mark Ravenhill will bring his new play Over There. Plus Hollywood man of the moment James McAvoy is to star in Richard Greenberg’s acclaimed play Three Days of Rain at the Apollo, and at The Old Vic Richard Dreyfuss headlines the world premiere of American playwright Joe Sutton’s new play Complicit, directed by Kevin Spacey.

“BASED ON A FILM”

In musical theatre, 2009 promises to be a year of great big fabulous and familiar shows, surely enough to see us through the dark times? And it’s no coincidence that many of them are based on hugely successful films.

Oliver! will be well and truly steaming ahead through 2009 at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal with Rowan Atkinson and Jodie Prenger; La Cage Aux Folles will continue camping it up at the Playhouse but with Graham Norton taking over from Douglas Hodge; and at the Adelphi Theatre Lee Mead will bow out of Joseph to be replaced by Gareth Gates.

Jason Donovan will be donning the wigs and lip gloss to take us on an Australian power-mince in Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre. And Sister Act at the London Palladium will be doing its best to recreate the fun of the film, helped along by Whoopi Goldberg as co-producer. And not quite a musical but as good as, Calendar Girls the stage play will up the naked flesh quotient in the West End, starring Patricia Hodge and Lynda Bellingham at the Noel Coward Theatre.

KIDS RULE

Kids should also see a good year in 2009 with an enormous live theatrical production of Walking with Dinosaurs coming to a stadium near you, and War Horse transfers from its successful run at the National Theatre to the New London Theatre.

Book these shows here