What’s in a Theatre Name?

I have mixed feelings about the re-naming of the Cottesloe Theatre in the National as the Dorfman.

This will happen once the extensive refurbishments are complete, in honour of Lloyd Dorfman, chairman of Travelex, who has facilitated the admirable £10 ticket scheme and has now pledged a personal £10m to the NT.

But the Travelex scheme itself highlights what is wrong with the NT’s use of its subsidy. Instead of keeping all seats at a low price, which is what the vast amount of public subsidy should be used for in the first place, it salves its conscience through private philanthropy on a limited scheme that places its overall pricing policy in a false light.

All tickets in the subsidised sector should be priced much lower, across the board. The government should insist on this. So should we.

All tickets at the NT and RSC, for instance, should be priced at £25 tops, ideally at £15 or £10, with concessions.That is what subsidy is for, not a flashy and superfluous neon lighting effect in Men Should Weep, or five more people in the marketing department.  

The name of the Cottesloe doesn’t really mean anything to anyone, but at least it represents a family involved in the public benefit of the theatre form its earliest days, as does the Lyttelton. The Olivier speaks for itself.

The re-naming of theatres is a dastardly habit, anyway. At least we are not as bad about it as they are on Broadway, where they re-name theatres at the drop of a hat, sometimes even for critics.

I still think of the Noel Coward in London as the Albery, just as an older generation still thinks of it as the New. And the Gielgud on Shaftesbury Avenue is still really the Globe in my mind, though no-one can quarrel with the new name.

The newest-named theatre on Broadway is the Sondheim, formerly the Henry Miller, which has had a distinctly chequered career, at various times operating as a porn cinema and a nightclub.  

Again, in this instance, no-one can really argue with the new moniker, but then no-one could possibly harbour very strong feelings about the Henry Miller anyway. It’s not exactly the Haymarket, or even the Brooks Atkinson (that’s the theatre named after a critic).

Which begs the question: whatever happened to Cameron Mackintosh’s plans to build a new Sondheim Theatre himself at the top of the block which is buttressed by the Queen’s and the Gielgud?  
 
If anyone’s entitled to have a London theatre named after him on philanthropic (let alone theatrical) grounds it’s Mackintosh, whose personal investment in theatres far exceeds that of Lloyd Dorfman and who, unlike the Travelex mogul, will always have a place in the heart of London theatregoers.