Shawshank tanks

Rejoice! Jump for joy! Do the hokey-cokey with untrammelled delight! Shawshank has tanked. The news that the Wyndham Theatre’s production of the The Shawshank Redemption is to close early on November 29th hasn’t exactly been a Kleenex moment for West End-watchers. You could hear the cries of whoopeedo at the other end of Shaftesbury Avenue. Fair enough. The show had many flaws. It mimicked the original with an obsessive and almost stalker-ish fidelity. Its directorial ambition was at pantomime level. And the lead actors looked so similar to Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman that the casting director might have been Madame Tussaud. But the show was entertaining enough. The simple, powerful characterisations and the fancifully escapist storyline worked their special magic but to no avail. The punters stayed away and the show will close next weekend. So why the exultation?

The failure of a costly artistic venture shouldn’t attract ululations of joy. It’s only a play after all. Yet for some reason, the West End brings out a peculiar strain of cultural piety in the play-going public. We expect great things of our theatre. Semi-consciously we divide London shows into Bad and Good.

Bad – musicals, movie revivals, back-catalogue tribute shows and anything involving a reality-TV star.

Good – Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, Beckett, Pinter and anything written by a dead foreigner.

The assumption is that Bad equals high profits, Good equals high art. And in a sense we should be proud of our idealism. It proves how passionately we care about the West End’s aesthetic complexion. At least we profess to care. There’s a group of people who care even more than we do. They care so much they put their money, not just their opinions, into the theatre. London’s impresarios. So let’s see where they stand on Good and Bad.

The West End is concentrated in the hands of three companies, Nimax Theatres, Delfont Mackintosh and Ambassador Theatre Group, (leaving aside the odd ‘sole trader’ like the Donmar and the Old Vic).  Check the programmes of the three majors and you’ll see an enormously varied menu. Shakespeare, puppet shows, cheesy musicals, rehashed movies, modern classics, adaptations of novels, vintage foreign imports and so on. You’ll also notice that not one of the three majors is pushing Bad theatre. They offer Bad and Good in equal measure.

The notion that the West End is seething with pimps and smash-n-grab artists debasing our theatre and raiding it for quick profits is simply untrue. The wide range reflects the great variety of the public’s pickiness, curiosity and sophistication. And a broad choice insures the investors against losses. Producers have to keep at least half a dozen venues going in order to protect their total investment. Running a single theatre in the West End is all but impossible. Two flops in a row and you’re bankrupt. (Kevin Spacey keeps the Old Vic going with a brilliant mixture of celebrity casting and popular programming but it’s still a white-knuckle ride.)

Mounting a West End production costs about £400,000. Double that, or treble it, if you’re putting on a musical. A typical play, with a star in the lead, will run for 13 weeks and break into profit in week nine or week ten. You invest massively, you recoup modestly. Business schools have a word for this commercial model: bonkers. The only thing that keeps the impresarios sinking their millions into London theatre is their sheer love of the business. So don’t pull your hair out when you hear that yet another cheesy musical or dead-safe movie revival is coming into town. And if some tedious copycat effort is about to close, think first before vaulting the banisters with a chorus of ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’. These paydirt productions keep the engine ticking over. They give the producers scope to do the sort of show everybody adores – the ground-breaking, award-winning, critic-bedazzling, zeitgeist-capturing smash-hit new play written by a genius living in a bedsit.