I have an annual summer date with my godson when we go to see a show at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London. It's a magical night, seeing the sun go down and the lights come on, and even if it rains, it's still an event. He's only nine, but he coped very well with Shakespeare last year. This week, we are going to that Loewe and Lerner evergreen Camelot.
I was keen for us to have good seats - when you're not yet into double figures, what is the use of a romping Broadway classic if you can't see past someone in a waterproof poncho? I mentioned this in passing to the lady at the box office, to which she responded: "He's a child, then?" I affirmed that indeed he was, at which point she told me that the £24 ticket I was about to snap up for him would cost me only £12. A child's rate in the West End!
I honestly can't think of the last time when a regular, no-strings concession was offered to me for a show this side of Watford Gap. I mean, without having to queue all night or it being part of some special sponsored deal (fabulous though Travelex most certainly is).
I take my children to the theatre a lot and have become dully familiar with having to pay the full whack. I even paid through the nose for The Tweenies at Wembley. And I will never forget the stern woman at the box office for The Lion King, who insisted that I fork out £150 for three full-price tickets. This was a total nonsense given that one of the junior Millards was still in nappies, sat on my knee throughout and had to be taken home at half-time because of nervous exhaustion.
I know, with £50 tickets and an auditorium full of disgruntled adults who kept turning round and glaring at every squeak, you are probably thinking what a madwoman I was to take a child to a West End show in the first place. But The Lion King is a children's show, produced by Disney, is it not?
It's the same throughout London, where most of the "child-friendly" musicals that many parents, quite rightly, feel their child would gain from experiencing have a thoroughly adult ticket policy and are seemingly inured to the outlay required, particularly for families with more than one child.
Oliver! had a child's ticket price only after it had been running for aeons, and if you want to get anything decent out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where the car flies over the expensive seats, you will have to cough up £45 per sprog. About the same price as a pair of shoes - and for a special treat, why not?
But as I well remember that champion of public service theatre, Richard Eyre, saying: "Shoes never let you down with an occasional bad performance." Those were his words at the launch of London's Soho Theatre (average seat price £14). Sadly, Eyre has not continued campaigning for accessible tickets in his latest incarnation as director of the capital's most eagerly awaited family musical, Mary Poppins, for which parents will again feel they must fork out around £50 per ticket, because who wants to submit their children to restricted view purdah on the fourth tier?
All of which turns a night for a child in the West End into a rarity to be enjoyed once every other year, and makes the notion of developing a theatregoing habit impossible.
