Hampstead Undercuts NT's Tenner Tickets???

While the RSC and, in the West End, the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) has followed the National Theatre's lead of reducing ticket prices to just £10, Hampstead Theatre's newly installed artistic director Anthony Clark has topped Nicholas Hytner's initiative - or rather bottomed it. As part of Clark's inaugural season this autumn, Hampstead are holding back up to 650 seats every week and offering them for just £6.50 to anyone under 26 or on full benefit. And that's in addition to an expansion of the theatre's existing £9 concessions. Clark explains the thinking behind his radical ticket-pricing overhaul: "At Hampstead, we've just doubled the size of our auditorium and we want to encourage more people to catch the theatre going habit. Both at Contact Theatre in Manchester and at The Door in Birmingham, keeping prices down helped me build an audience for new writing. I'd like to see catching a new play become as important to people culturally as seeing a new film, or reading a new novel - and we mustn't price ourselves out of our potential market; a good play can have more impact than almost any other art form."

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