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I’ve not seen the viewing figures for the weekend just gone, but over the weekend before on October 8, The X Factor averaged an audience of 9.2m viewers between 8pm and 10.20pm on Saturday October 6, with a five-minute peak of 10.3 million. Meanwhile, Strictly Come Dancing‘s first live show the same night attracted an average audience of 8.7m between 6.30pm and 7.45pm, with a five-minute peak of 10.2m.
By contrast, total attendance for the West End across all of 2011 was 13,915,185.
Of course, you can’t compare these figures like-for-like: West End figures are based on actual box office receipts, not extrapolations of viewing figures based on a sample of the population; and also buying an expensive West End ticket (or even a cheaper one!) involves a level of commitment and travel that turning on the TV, or switching channels, from the comfort of your sofa simply doesn’t.
But it’s still striking how one single programme broadcast can reach nearly as many people in one night as live theatre does across over all our West End theatres across the entire year. On that basis, theatre is still a relatively exclusive activity.
And if that’s the case with theatres that variously seat from around 450 people (the Ambassadors) to nearly 2,300 (the London Palladium), how exclusive does that make a theatre like the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs (80 seats) or Jermyn Street Theatre (70 seats)? More than that: Stomp is on a seemingly never-ending run at the Ambassadors, so even though the house is comparatively small, its annual potential audience reach isn’t.
By contrast, the 30 performance run of All That Fall at Jermyn Street Theatre, that opened last Thursday, will reach a total maximum audience of just 1,800 people. No wonder that, with Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins starring under the direction of Trevor Nunn, it sold out almost the moment it went on sale. The Jermyn Street Theatre’s website even says the waiting list for tickets is closed.
Of course there’s no answer to this: the supply was always going to exceed the demand. Yet it is being done in conditions that director Trevor Nunn states are perfect: in an interview with the Daily Telegraph last week, he commented,
It’s wonderful to be in an intimate space – the actors don’t have to over-project, they can be intimate and real with each other as if we were listening to radio and we can have a minimum of movement.
So it will be seen by a few aficionados (and AA Gill, who was seated next to me at the opening last Thursday). But Michael Billington, in his Guardian review, wondered aloud if there was another way:
Although the production’s impact depends upon the intimacy of the space, I just wish it could be televised so that both the play and Atkins’s performance could be relished by the many as well as the lucky few.
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Comments 8 comments
Does everything have to be available for everyone? It is not fair to compare the audience for X Factor ( or any television show for that matter) to any theatre production. The only effort an audience member has to make to watch televsion is to turn it on. They don’t have to get dressed. They don’t have to stop eating or cooking dinner. They don’t even have to look at it or listen to it. It is simply “on”. Attending All That Fall involved planning in advance, transportation, walking down a couple of flights of steps and most importantly, paying attention. There were 5 empty seats at Saturday’s matinee – they could’ve been filled because I am sure there are at least 5 people out there who would’ve waited for returns or no shows, by cutting off the possibility of a waiting list the Jermyn Street is denying people who are willing to make an effort of seeing the show. Let’s be honest, as much as I would like to believe that Atkins/Gambon and Beckett could sell out a large West End Theatre, maybe in this day and age they couldn’t . Every play and production has its own alchemy and this one has found a “perfect” venue. If someone wants to film it to preserve it – all the better, but lets not forget that there are 1800 people ( less 5 ) who were able to see these performances close up. And there were no celebrities ( that I could see) in our audience. Just theatrelovers.Report comment
@Laurence Kupp: You are only repeating what I already said! “Also buying an expensive West End ticket (or even a cheaper one!) involves a level of commitment and travel that turning on the TV, or switching channels, from the comfort of your sofa simply doesn’t.”
I’m shocked to hear that there were empty seats, though. Given that latecomers can’t be admitted to the performance, any seats unfilled by curtain up should be released to sell again.Report comment
@Mark: sort of, but its apples and oranges. You seem to come at it from the point of view that there should always be more seats and that exclusivity is a bad / unfair thing and I don’t. I like the idea that some things are special, take effort and commitment on the part of the audience. In a similar way, you are a huge fan of cabaret , which is smaller and more intimate than even a Beckett play at Jermyn Street.Report comment
@Laurence Kupp: Where, exactly, do I say that exclusivity is a “bad/unfair” thing? I’m just pointing out that, by its nature, and even in the West End with thousand more seats than Jermyn Street Theatre, it is ALWAYS going to be an exclusive activity, compared to mass activities like TV watching. And yes, there is a difference in the way both are enjoyed, which I also already said.
But get your facts right before you say cabaret is smaller and more intimate than Jermyn Street; the new Hippodrome’s Matcham Room, of which I am a HUGE fan, is small and intimate — but at 140 seats, has DOUBLE the seating capacity than Jermyn Street.Report comment
As regular readers of your blog know, you extoll the virtues of Cabaret on a regular basis, and I believe one of your favorite experiences of recent years is a one-on-one cabaret. One new room in London ( and lovely one at that) is not what I was referring to. As for the other “bad/unfair” thing perhaps I am reading into this blog information from other blogs over the years where you have complained about big theatre events in small spaces and the fact that access to them is severely limited – Ewan Macgregor at the Donmar, Pinter upstairs at the Court etc. You may not have said exclusivity is bad in this blog but there has been an implication of it in the past. Forgive me for reading between the lines.Report comment
The flip side to this is that more people have seen shows like Les Miserables and Phantom than have seen Titanic the movie… Not everything is so exclusive.Report comment
Ive enjoyed a couple of NTLive cinema screenings of plays that I couldnt get to recently, id love for other theatre companies to do similar, though obviously wouldnt expect somewhere like JST to be able to.
Its nice to hear of a soldout show however small the venue, there have been far too many empty seats at all sizes of venues on my recent theatre trips.Report comment
I was also (pre-booked) at Jermyn Street on Saturday afternoon. For the record, a few people who had turned up on the off-chance did see the show though empty seats remained.
Talking of small spaces, the new Jez Butterworth play, The River, opens upstairs at the Royal Court this week and we shall see how the already- controversial ‘tickets only on the day’ system pans out.Report comment