Honour Bayes: (No) Royal Court reservations
Sat in marvellous splendour above the ‘Become a Friend’ title of the Royal Court’s webpage is a production shot of Jerusalem. Rooster grins out at us surrounded by a raucous gang of youths, clearly having the time of his life. What better way to encourage potential members than Jez Butterworth’s smash?
It all comes down to ticketing policy. Monday marked the Royal Court’s announcement of Dominic Cooke’s penultimate season and it’s a corker, with new plays from Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Lucy Kirkwood as well as Butterworth.
But whilst I was happily imagining some sort of theatrical Avengers being created from this dream team (seriously who would be The Hulk?) a small storm had started over the following message posted on the webpage of The River, Butterworth’s hotly anticipated intimate three hander taking place in the small upstairs studio space:
“For The River, no tickets will be available for advance purchase. All tickets will go on sale on the day of performance, with an allocation on sale online at 9am and an allocation released for in person sales at 10am from the Royal Court Theatre Box Office.”
A few little birds began to twitter. No advanced purchase?! What are members paying their money for if not to have this privilege? What if you don’t live in London and therefore don’t have the ability to use an on-the-day booking system?
As one of the biggest perks of being a member is to get first dibs on tickets it is perhaps understandable that this raised a question mark. And for those living outside of London leaving booking til the day is highly restrictive.
However I also completely agree with the Royal Court when they said to me, “because we anticipate high demand for The River, we really want to ensure that the tickets are sold as democratically as possible, instead of selling-out within hours and therefore only going to people ‘in the know’”.
Indeed why should the super organised or privileged (as Andrew Haydon wisely said “Strikes me, all these ‘Friends’ of the Court don’t realise there are Corporate ‘Friends’ who would strip the sales days before”) always have the edge?
Perhaps I am biased here. If I am not lucky enough to be reviewing a show I am often one of the people who’ve missed out by the time I get round to booking for it.
Aptly the Royal Court’s The Witness is one such occurrence with Vivienne Franzmann’s second play now completely sold out within a little over a week of its run. Returns are available in person one hour before the performance, but the unreliability of this system means that these two ‘on the day’ options are not genuinely comparable.
Is this a sign of new things to come? The Royal Court tells me that this is not a strategy they are intending to take forward, saying “This ticket policy was just introduced for The River to deal with the problem of high demand. It’s a one-off at the moment.” Either way it will be an interesting tester to see if this new form of ticketing works.
Because is a democratic ticketing process one which favours organised diarists and corporate groups, or one which favours people who have the time each morning to try to get their hands on a golden ticket? And should more productions with limited audience space be sold like this? Only time, and the audiences of The River, will tell.
