The West End is not Heathrow

Why the notion of Fast Track theatre tickets is just greed

Let’s deal with this notion of the Fast Track Theatre queue. This is the big new idea from Ambassadors Theatre Group, whereby for an additional fee of £10, you can Skip the Queue, not to buy a ticket but to get into the theatre itself.

Hence if you have splashed out £300 (say) on a top ticket for a West End show in London such as Moulin Rouge, then for an extra tenner you can flash past all those sad losers waiting on the pavement outside and have…..er, early entry into a forlorn space a couple of feet away.

FAST TRACK!!

Pay £10 to step from the pavement into the foyer before everyone else. That’s it.

A spokesman from ATG commented; “Much like similar initiatives in other sectors, we aim to make the theatre experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible…a quicker, more relaxed entry into the venue adds that little extra convenience and confidence to the overall experience.”

What? ATG is not some cash-strapped Arts Council-funded playhouse, urged to make commercial decisions or go under. This is an entertainment giant which runs 64 venues in the US and Europe and whose parent company last year made a record £143 million profit. And now it is focusing its efforts on screwing more money out of people, by pretending that going to the theatre is as stressful as getting onto a plane at Heathrow.

Except it’s not. “Fast Track” in airports has a wholly different meaning. When you are going to see Hamilton at the Empire in Liverpool, so is everyone else around you. When you are flying to New York, you have to negotiate past thousands of people en route to other destinations, while shopping, eating, putting their liquids into see-through bags, and the rest of it. Queues of other passengers going somewhere else can sometimes make the difference between catching and missing a flight. You are never going to miss the opening number of a show because you are in a queue to get into the theatre.

ATG is actually suggesting THIS as a valid summary of theatre-going

ATG has simply surveyed its audience, considered “how can we make more money?”, frightened us with the fiction of horror queues borrowed from airports and introduced a two-tier setup from the outset. As if that didn’t exist already. To be honest, the miniscule entry queue is possibly the sole democratic moment of an entire evening at the theatre, as everything from then on in depends on the “price point” of your seat.

Well, you can always look at the ceiling

Anyone wanting to pay vaguely rational prices for a West End show these days is doomed to sit either a vertical mile above the stage behind a barrier, or in some sort of Hobbit hole with wildly compromised sight lines.

There are anomalies. There are a couple of very good value balcony seats in the Royal Opera House, and four cheap and cheerful seats upstairs in Islington’s Almeida, although you have to watch out. I once snapped them up in order to see Simon Russell Beale in Richard II only to find that Ultz, the set designer, had not taken them into consideration. We had to pretend we were listening to the radio version.

This Saturday, I am an ATG customer as I will be taking a family party of seven, including my 93 year old father, to see the National Theatre’s touring production of An Inspector Calls, at ATG’s New Theatre, Wimbledon.

When buying the tickets from the ATG site I was offered all sorts of other pre-paid ‘treats’ in addition to the ludicrous Fast Track. All of them bonkers. Folks, I could have pre-ordered Prosecco at £7.50 a glass before the show, (thus using up all that time saved skipping the queue). Or champagne at £14 a glass. Or I could have gone for the “Family Bundle”, consisting of some popcorn, two ‘house’ drinks, two soft drinks and ice cream, for £45. Wowser! Maybe I’ll get two “Bundles”, since there are so many of us. So that’s an extra £160, if we all go Fast Track (unlikely).

If we’d been in the West End, I might have been tempted by the “Aristocracy Package”, £35 for a mini bottle of Moet, a programme (‘depending on availability’) and ice cream (‘depending on freezability’, presumably). At some ATG theatres there is even a VIP interval area where (for yet another £10 per head), you might get a seat and some speedy service, or as ATG puts it; “a special bar we keep consciously uncrowded so you get quick service.”

I am all for entrepreneurial gusto, but hello? A special bar? Hey, ATG, how about spending some of your colossal profits on remodelling tired auditoria such as the New Theatre Wimbledon, or the Harold Pinter, or the Piccadilly, making the bars large and effective, ditto the Ladies loo provision, and how about some decent booze and proper snacks? Andrew Lloyd Webber has spent £60 million doing all of these things at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with the result that his audience feels properly looked after and might well return.

ATG is clearly not blind to the faults in its venues, but rather than sort them out, it has taken the policy of charging customers to avoid them. Furthermore, what it provides for the extra cash is sub-standard. The wine is filthy, the snacks are corner-shop quality and the seats are moth-eaten. Deal with that before you go all VIP on me.

If you must offer ‘treats’, why not put some imagination into them? I might well have booked a £50 local car for my father. I will order an Uber, but if it had been available via ATG, I would have used it. Equally, if I had been offered the chance to pay for something truly VIP, such as a pre-theatre talk from original director Stephen Daldry or a backstage tour afterwards, I might have been interested. As it is, no thanks. We’ll go and have a drink afterwards at home.

One more thing. In being so outrageously greedy, ATG might well be killing Mother Goose (in or out of pantomime season). A recent YouGov survey found the main reason that people don’t go to the theatre as often as they might, is not because they lack “confidence”. It’s because going to the theatre is too expensive.