In Defense of Local Theatre: Put Your Phone Away!

When I sat down to write the notes for this article, at gone midnight on a night when I had spent the evening at a local theatre, I fully intended to write a piece about going to the ballet for the very first time, and what I took from that experience. That was the plan. I might write that article still one day, if there are any Vultures who care for in-depth discussion and analysis of ballet. This is not that article. This article is about the people I saw the ballet with – the good and the bad – and about local theatre and what value it possesses in a city that is only an hour by train away from the West End.

My local theatre is the Mayflower, Southampton. I can’t really compare it to other theatres that aren’t in London, because I haven’t really even been to any. For as long as I can remember, I have been taken to the Mayflower, my earliest memory of it being a performance of Doctor Dolittle that the internet informs me probably took place in 2001. Since then, I have seen any number of shows there; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Evita, The Sound of Music, The Lion King, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, to name but a mere few.

By comparison, I have seen a small handful of shows in the actual West End, the vast majority of which are probably Shakespeares that I saw on college trips. The maths is simple enough; if I did not live close to a theatre, I would not get to indulge my passion with anywhere near the regularity that I do at the moment. West End tickets are expensive, especially if you want to sit anywhere that you actually have a good view of the action. The best seats I ever had in London were for my twenty-first birthday when I saw Jersey Boys, and those tickets cost close to £90 each. At the Mayflower, the most expensive seats are no more than £50 and I recently saw a version of Sweeney Todd where a perfectly serviceable balcony seat cost me £8. You can’t argue with those numbers. If theatre is ever going to make itself completely accessible to people, the local theatre prices are going to be what draws people in.

On another note, I’d like to know where else you could rock up to a ballet performance after work on a Friday dressed in Converse and a jumper that you only realise afterwards is slightly stained (I work with kids, ok? They get messy and so do I!). I wouldn’t be welcome at the Opera House in Covent Garden dressed in such a way and nor would the girl a few rows down who had rips in her jeans. Local theatre is a great leveller in that way; because it is affordable, because it is popular with younger people and the less traditional theatre goer, it is much harder to shock anyone. People don’t dress up for local theatre, not in the same way they would dress up for London anyway. Maybe I was scraping the barrel a little with my paint stained jumper but the important thing is that it didn’t matter. No one was going to kick me out or even deny me entrance in the first place.

My only problem with local theatre is that, because of the laid back attitude, sometimes it goes a little bit too far, beyond casual, and into plain rude and definitely annoying. People were coming into the ballet twenty minutes after the start, disrupting whole rows of the audience when they were shown to their seats. I completely lost track of the thread of the first act because of the three people who sneaked into their seats almost twenty five minutes into the thirty minute first act.

In London, after ten minutes, they would have been made to stand to the side and wait for an appropriate time to take their seats. It was a highly noticeable number of people too and I cannot blame the ushers for it entirely, because if they had made these latecomers wait, there would have been a sizeable crowd blocking the fire exit. The times I have made the trip to the big theatres, no one has turned up as late as these people did. You can forgive one or two but when it seems like half the balcony, you begin to wonder exactly what was keeping them.

Another big issue that night was phones. Illegal recording of shows happens a lot in London, I know, because the videos on Youtube have to come from somewhere. I am not necessarily condoning the idea of recording shows but at least if you are doing that, you have some interest in the show itself. Several people within my eye line were on Whatsapp and their own photo albums, completely oblivious to how maddening a glowing phone in a dark theatre can be. I suspect that the low cost of tickets in local theatre are partly to blame for this; for £11, you are much more likely to come to a show to ‘try it out’, only to find that you don’t like it after all and you have to entertain yourself somehow, right? Wrong. However much you may be wishing you’d stayed at home, please, please, please don’t ruin someone else’s night with your phone in their face.

If you have a theatre near you that you have not visited before, or even if you have but maybe not recently, I can only recommend that you go and catch a show there. They are gold mines of shows just off the West End and sometimes shows that are still running in London. You don’t have to shell out for the good tickets or for the train to get there, and if you have any interest in the theatre then you are missing out if you don’t give it a shot at least once.

Turn up on time, savour the atmosphere and just get into it.

I very much doubt you will be disappointed, but if you happen to be, for whatever reason, then just suck it up and don’t whip your phone out for the last hour or two. You can blame me for suggesting you go – I don’t mind if you do – but someone else there is having a lovely time, and you don’t want to be the reason they end up having a bad night.

What will you see first?