Theatres Are Not “Museum Assets,” Says Lloyd Webber

In a debate in the House of Lords on 7th May, Andrew Lloyd Webber spoke of the conflict between the need to protect listed buildings and the requirements of modern audiences and performers.

“A substantial part of the cost of the recent refurbishment of buildings such as the Royal Festival Hall, the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House was the cost of maintaining the heritage aspects of the buildings,” he said. “We are talking about many, many millions of pounds, not the odd hundred thousand. For example, to install the air conditioning that is badly needed in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane would cost in the region of £15 million. Were it not to be a grade 1 listed building, the figure would be about £1 million to £2 million. The reason is that the Theatre Royal Drury Lane has no cavities in its walls in which air conditioning can be installed. The listing requirement means that every internal wall of the building would have to be taken down, a cavity for air conditioning created, and the wall rebuilt exactly as it was originally constructed.

“The difficulty for commercial theatre owners is that this expenditure yields no economic benefit in terms of the operational viability of their buildings. Not one more seat becomes available for sale as a result. Indeed, improving the audience experience while retaining the architectural qualities of the building normally means losing seats, which commercial theatres can ill afford to do.”

He also spoke of the problems facing the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus, which his Really Useful Theatres bought in the mid-eighties.

“The Palace has only 1,416 seats,” he said. “If all those seats were great, it would be a wonderful medium-scale musical or opera house, but they are not. Three hundred and seventeen of them are in one of the most vertiginous balconies in theatreland today and very hard to see from or to sell. They are cramped and impossible to reseat due to the rake. Thirty-eight seats are in boxes which are great if you want to be looked at rather than watch the show, and 274 seats are considered to be restricted view.

“Thus this wonderfully sited musical house has in practice only the number of seats of a large playhouse. Combined with the capital costs of, say, £3 million to £4 million for a production of a scale to fill the building, the running costs of such a production, let alone the cost of maintaining the building, will become extremely unviable as a theatre without public or private subsidy. The Palace is just a tip of the iceberg. Maybe it is an extreme example, but the fundamental problem of the theatre’s difficulty in keeping its head above water in today’s market is replicated on a differing scale all around the country.”

He went on to compare the situation of the Royal Court: “Without in any way deprecating the splendid achievements in Sloane Square, I draw attention to the fact that the public funds given to refurbish the Royal Court exceeded the total profit made by the four Shaftesbury Avenue playhouses since the Second World War.”

Looking back to when the theatres were built, he added, “Times were very different from ours in a whole series of ways. People were physically smaller; there was less demand for bars and lavatories; it was assumed that the wealthy expected to be segregated from the hoi polloi in terms of auditorium ingress and egress; no one gave any thought to access for disabled people; and, for a significant number of patrons, being seen was far more important than being able to see what was on stage. We need only think about most 19th century opera houses. Backstage, dressing rooms for non-star names were cramped, poorly located and without showers. Technical capacities were severely limited by current standards in terms of lighting, sound and stage machinery. The modern audience, performer and artistic teams today all expect modern facilities. Decent sight lines are paramount today—nobody wants to sit behind a pillar all evening.”

He asked the government “what action they will take to mitigate the constraints placed upon owners of listed places of entertainment seeking to provide modern facilities for customers and to satisfy contemporary artistic demands?

“Ownership of a listed building imposes on the owner a kind of involuntary trusteeship of what is deemed to be part of our national heritage” he said, “but buildings that are in living contemporary use surely cannot be treated as if they are museum assets.”

He finished by saying, “I urge noble Lords to understand that I am not proposing the wholesale demolition of London’s West End, nor am I suggesting that the taxpayer is suddenly faced with a huge bill to refurbish our ageing commercial theatre stock. But as someone who has spent more than forty years professionally involved with musical theatre, I felt that it was time to put my love of theatre architecture to one side and at least draw the attention of Her Majesty’s Government to some of the issues that confront theatre owners and artists as we head for the second decade of the 21st century.”

The Dominion Theatre

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Currently showing “We will Rock You”