Ben West

A diet of unrelenting mush

Ben West on the decline in quality of regional theatre; he fears it can only get worse

Ben West on the decline in quality of regional theatre; he fears it can only get worse

We may have been languishing for months in the worst recession for decades, but theatre appears to be booming. West End theatres enjoyed a record £500 million in ticket sales in 2009, with audience figures exceeding 14 million for the first time. Attendance for straight plays was up 26 per cent on 2008, at 3.6 million. The many hits have included Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s Waiting for Godot, the National Theatre’s War Horse, and Enron and Jerusalem, which both transferred from the Royal Court to the West End.

Quality theatre is supposedly infiltrating the regions, too, and there has been some good-quality stuff on the circuit recently, such as The Pitman Painters, The History Boys, Gethsemane and Citizenship. And confidence in regional theatre was underlined in November when the Ambassador Theatre Group expanded its portfolio of 23 London and regional theatres to 39, splashing out more than £90 million to buy those owned by Live Nation, making it the biggest theatre owner in Britain.

Well-known purveyors of quality regional drama, such as the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Chichester Theatres, the Birmingham Rep, and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, continue to put on intelligent, challenging and innovative work, while Sheffield Theatres and the Bristol Old Vic, having gone dark in recent years owing to redevelopment, are back in business.

However, theatres of this standard are depressingly rare. A glimpse at many regional theatre seasons reveals that the huge majority of Britain’s theatres exist on a diet of unrelenting mush. I am painfully aware of this because, for the past three years, my theatre show, Gertrude’s Secret, has been touring theatres all over the UK. We’ve played the whole range, from established regional venues such as The Minerva at Chichester, through regional artistic yet commercial powerhouses like the Oxford Playhouse, to tired venues in towns that appear to be cultural deserts, often economically devastated, clinging on for dear life to their dwindling theatre audiences.

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