IS IT SAFE TO GO BACK IN NOW? (Pt 2)

As part of our marketing partnerships with West End shows, we would regularly include a dozen or so rooms at a top London hotel for hosting Regional Press Nights. We would generally stipulate that these took place on a Friday Night, and that the invited Journalists could bring a partner. This meant that we could fete them on the Friday (dinner before the show, drinks after) and then they would spend Saturday in town with their partners. These were, after all, London Theatre Breaks, and, to the regional theatre-booker, London, the most exciting city on Earth, was always a key, if not the key part of the equation. We always used the same hotel for these events. We were risking our relationship with some of the biggest shows in the world (no, make that THE biggest) and the last thing we could afford was a bad review because of an issue at the hotel. More often than not, the biggest risk was that the reviewers were so comfortable at the hotel they needed to make a supreme effort to actually get in the cab and come and see the show.

The owners of the hotel also owned a more high profile London hotel, t.b.h. one of the most famous in the world. And it might have worried us when the GM from our Press Trip Hotel was moved over to run the flagship, but it didn’t. Because the thing about this guy was that, as we well knew, his team were even more eager to get it right when he wasn’t in the building than when he was. His personal standards of customer care had been hard-wired into his team, through the medium of his personality, to such an extent that when he wasn’t in the building his spirit still inhabited it. And when his Deputy was subsequently headhunted by another hotel group, the chain continued through to the third GM. And so on.

Yesterday I attended a discussion (remotely) on how theatres would be adapting to meet both the (hopefully) short term Covid challenge and the greater (more expensive) needs of accessibility and sustainability, especially in our older buildings.* And while the debate about the architectural and technical adjustments underway had me gripped (I have not given up on my dream of building a state-of-the-art 1600-seater Musical theatre in the West End) a little voice in my head kept asking “What about the theatre managers?” The people whose personalities would need to pervade every square centimetre of these buildings, both backstage and Front of House, during the most demanding period since Boney’s threatened invasion (Napoleon not Frank Farian). And, more to the point, how would their teams cope when these managers weren’t in the building? When an anxious parent demanded to see them because a patron two rows back had a coughing fit? Or an (obvious) shyster tried to short-cut the extended admission’s process by claiming a) a mysterious disability b) acquaintance with the Producer’s best-friend’s gardener’s sister? How would they be able to cut trouble-makers out from the herd (and thereby avoid a stampede) with communal areas being greatly reduced? And the sixty-four-thousand dollar question… how would these front-line teams continuously generate that glow of confidence, inspired by their managers, to maintain patrons’ trust both throughout the visit and (crucially) into the tales shared later with family and friends?

Buildings are great, but people make places. And memories. And a vibrant theatre sector. And we are going to need all our great theatre managers on the top of their game in order to make theatre truly ‘sustainable’ and ‘accessible’ over the weeks and months (and years) to come. …And especially when they’re not even in the building

*Having spent several years working in both the oldest and newest theatre in the West End that doesn’t always follow. Drury Lane was last rebuilt during the Napoleonic Wars, with many of the country’s foremost figures needing greater accessibility, while it had simply not been a consideration in 1976 when the New London opened.