Display of affection - theatre poster design

Published Wednesday 3 May 2006 at 11:30 by Sofie Mason

From West Side Story’s advertising blitz in the fifties to the iconic Cats motif of the eighties, poster design has had to adapt to win the hearts and wallets of theatregoers. But does it have a future?

Poster design has always, of course, been dictated by the technology available. Truffle through the Theatre Museum and you will move from 16th-century letter presses to printing presses, from black ink to red, from woodcuts to colour lithographs and from photography to photo montage. All, irrespective of technology, are quite literally reminding you of the story. They are either very wordy or very busy or very descriptive. Fast forward to the eighties and you come smack up against two cat’s eyes, hardly any words and an image so minimalist it speaks volumes. What happened?

When Trevor Nunn, Cameron Mackintosh and the creative team sat in the offices of Dewynters and first saw the image for Cats in 1981 there was an intake of breath, an agonising pause and then complete approval. Many across the industry agree that this was the seminal moment when theatre posters moved away from the representational to the iconic and the first global brand was born.

Undoubtedly it would have always happened at some point, as poster graphics have always followed in the footsteps of advertising generally, which was increasingly concentrating on this thing called ‘brand’. Film posters had got there in the seventies - remember The Godfather? But Cats is when it actually happened in the theatre industry. John Snelson, theatre musicologist and author of books on Andrew Lloyd Webber and Wagner, observes: “Posters moved away from telling us what a show was about to telling us what it was like. One white mask and a red rose on a black background told us that this Phantom of the Opera was not so much horror story as gothic romance.” In the noughties, for Bashment at Theatre Royal Stratford East, a close-up of a black man with his face in his hands drenched in stage lights as bright as his bling spoke to us of black music and shame.

Undoubtedly, this move away from the busy to the minimalist would have always happened for other reasons too. From the eighties onwards, the selling of merchandise around the bigger shows became an increasingly lucrative sideline with every baseball cap, T-shirt and branded bag needing an eye-catching logo. And as marketing tools proliferated, the logo of a show had to adapt to flyers, direct mail, e-shots or websites. It had to adapt internationally as well as the world became more globally connected. It may take a year or two to refine a logo but, once it is bedded in, a show now travels with its identity intact. If you look back at the less globally interconnected times of West Side Story in the fifties you will find perhaps 20 different posters for the same show. All in all, a poster and its logo today are selling a brand that is so much bigger than its parts - bigger than the individual artist or venue.

Today’s theatre poster is a highly sophisticated prompt for a highly sophisticated consumer who is used to picking up the clues, deconstructing references, feeling flattered and drawn in by the cleverness of it all. But where do we go from here? Anthony Pye-Jeary, the owner of Dewynters who was responsible for the Cats poster, thinks there will be more turning points. Yet he believes, after almost 40 years in the industry, that the poster is no longer at the forefront of marketing a show. You may print 2,000 posters but you will also print two million leaflets. Print still accounts for the greatest proportion of marketing spend overall and the greatest return on investment in the performing arts, according to a survey in March by London Calling but print is much more than posters.

There has been a huge change since the eighties from ‘above the line’ marketing to ‘below the line’ marketing. The graphics of the poster have transmogrified on to flyers, postcards, e-shots, pop-ups and website branding. If the poster has lost its purpose, let’s look again to advertising generally and guess at the future. The big boys are moving away from conventional advertising on TV and in print and moving towards the internet, mobiles and product placement in films and TV where they can still catch us unawares.

One of the more bizarre stunts was by Birra Peroni who rented a store on Sloane Street for a month and reserved the interior for a bottle of its beer sitting on a pedestal. So, in line with marketing trends, if the cutting edge of advertising is about where you place your brand, then the theatre poster may be in for a comeback in the most unexpected places.

* Sofie Mason, an arts fundraiser and marketing specialist, is co-founder of OffWestEnd.com