Is celebrity casting ruining the West End?

Or is it cleverly injecting our elderly theatres with a young, enthusiastic audience who want to see their heroes in the flesh?

I am officially bored of celebrities. We were having lunch in Sydney Harbour on New Year’s Day. Sydney IS New Year, particularly when Edinburgh cancels Hogmanay after a bad forecast. We settled down to a delicious meal of fusion-something opposite the Opera House.

We couldn’t see the Opera House, however, because the entire view was demolished by the presence of a superliner, called Celebrity Edge. As if. Celebrities are NOT edgy, unless you happen to be interviewing one who is in a bad mood (c.f. Grant, H; Holland, T).

A small craft in Sydney Harbour

Why would you want to be near an edgy celebrity, even figuratively, while on board a pricey global cruise and engaging with travelling the world? Heaven knows.

Back on dry land however, celebrities can, and are, being rather helpful at the moment in the UK, with regard to their deployment in an art form often decried as dying, dead or dismal, namely the British theatrical canon.

In this I am in wild disagreement with AN Wilson, who was all doom and gloom in the Times this week with a grumpy column headlined “You can’t save theatres with film stars alone…bad actors and ludicrous ticket prices are combining to bury one of the glories of our history.” No, no, Mr Wilson. They are SAVING it. Hoorah for celebrities!

When I got back to London my younger son, aged 20, expressed a desire to see Jamie Lloyd’s production of The Tempest, currently on at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He hadn’t heard of Sigourney Weaver, (who is playing Prospero to varying degrees of critical acclaim), but he had very much heard of Mathew Horne, the Gavin and Stacey actor who has been cast as the jester Trinculo.

Mathew Horne (r) literally upstaging Sigourney Weaver (behind)

So, off we went to Drury Lane. I feared that all the duff reviews about Weaver would mean a half empty house. Far from it. Thanks to dynamic ticketing, the £231 seats about which dear old Wilson was moaning, and which were fully available a couple of days before, had miraculously become £85 seats and hey presto! You have a full house. This is worth remembering. If you fancy seeing a show which has not found favour with the critics, give it a go. Critics have off nights, too (I was one for a couple of merry years). Plus, the place was full of Gavin and Stacey fans. What a night!

The show was not perfect, but Weaver did what she could, and delivered her “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” speech beautifully. Horne was hilarious and had a blast on stage. The role allows for it, as Trinculo not only gets into a fight with Caliban, but is also drunk for most of the time. Horne, whose physical skills and theatrical timing are not to be underestimated, loved it. The audience laughed like drains whenever he opened his mouth, and applauded wildly at the end. This is what the West End is about!

Meanwhile, still with Shakespeare, across London at The Barbican Mathew Baynton is giving us a properly funny Bottom in Eleanor Rhode’s delicious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both my sons wanted to come, not least because Baynton is well known to them for his madcap roles in Horrible Histories, the satirical history TV series.

Playing the ass…Baynton’s Bottom

This production is only on for a few more days (it closes on January 18), but is terrific and really worth trying to see, if you can. After it closes you can stream it on Marquee TV. Baynton, like Horne, has clearly had major theatrical grounding before making it in the TV studio. He owns the stage and the audience loves him, almost as much as Titania does. It also has the best argument scene between the Athenian lovers I have ever seen, plus Lysander and Demetrius, so often played as almost interchangeable, are wildly different from each other.

Again, the audience was young and enthusiastic, and again this is probably because the bitter pill of being dragooned along to see Shakespeare at Christmas was leavened by the knowledge that a comic celebrity was involved in the show, in some way.

Please could all those earnest beavers writing agonised Arts Council of England dictats which order its clients to bring in younger, more diverse audiences, remember that canny producers are already finding answers to this question? There is a torrent of talent from television, film and online constantly pouring past the doors of theatre. Clever casting is one which welcomes famous faces into the creaky, low pay world of the stage. It not only moves ticket sales in a quite phenomenal way, but it delivers a markedly different feel in the auditoria of our theatres.

It means live Shakespeare in London is not only for scholars, tourists or oldies. It means that our national poet can be enjoyed and treasured afresh and it means that our theatres, both subsidised and commercial, are thronging with people for whom theatre might be a new, exciting experience.

Stand by for Tom ‘Loki’ Hiddleston as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, also at Drury Lane, this February. Marvel fans walk this way!

The God of Mischief comes to Drury Lane