Abstract
In February 1993 a new musical, The Invisible Man, transferred from the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, to the Vaudeville in London’s West End. It joined the seventeen other musicals already to be found there, and is the second recent transfer from Stratford. But it differs from the other, Five Guys Named Moe, in one way. Five Guys had been backed by Cameron Mackintosh, the resultant income having been largely responsible for keeping the Theatre Royal in existence for the last two years; the new musical has relied entirely on backing from local supporters of the theatre. Either way, however, the fact of these two musicals points to the central dilemma confronting all non-commercial theatre today.
Ted: All I had when I was your age went into a suitcase. I only wanted the use of a hall. I wanted to change the view from the French windows.
Tom: That’s about all you will change through plays because 99 out of 100 people never go near a live theatre and when they do they want girls got up as cats or trains.
(Peter Nichols, A Piece of My Mind, 1987)
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Notes
Adrian Noble, ‘A sponsor’s farewell’, Guardian, 13 January 1993.
Figures and quotation from Maurice Chittendon, ‘West End curtains come down’, The Sunday Times, 10 January 1993.
David Edgar, ‘New state of play’, Guardian, 1 March 1993.
Philip Hedley, ‘Invisible dangers’, Guardian, 10 February 1993.
Arthur Miller, ‘Death of a theatre’, Guardian, 1 February 1993.
E. Jane Dickson, ‘The court of new appeal’, The Sunday Times, 15 August 1993.
Peter Nichols, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Dramatist’, The Independent, 23 January 1993.
Ruth Kelly, ‘Britain sinks towards the bottom of the world wealth league’, Guardian, 22 June 1993.
John McGrath, The Bone Won’t Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times (Methuen, 1989), p. x and p. 166.
David Edgar, The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), p. 166.
David Lister, ‘Arts-goers are mainly old and rich’, Independent on Sunday, 6 June 1993.
David McGillvray (ed.), The British Alternative Theatre Directory 93–94 (Rebecca Books, 1993), pp. 11 and 13.
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© 1994 John Bull
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Bull, J. (1994). Into the Nineties. In: Stage Right. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23379-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23379-3_12
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