After years in development, Paddington: The Musical has finally opened in the West End to five-star reviews across the board. It is being dubbed “unmissable”. Except, a great many people will have to miss it, given how expensive the tickets are. How much will the chance to see Paddington set you back? The next available tickets are for the end of January and start at £130 each. A bargain.
A survey from The Stage magazine conducted this year found that the most expensive tickets to events had risen by five per cent from the previous year. One high (or low) point was Giant, on earlier this year and starring John Lithgow as Roald Dahl, which The Times found a ticket going for £436.
Theatre is one of London’s most beloved cultural gemstones — 17.1 million people see a play here every year. And yet, it has rarely felt so inaccessible to the people that live there.
What is going on? As is often the case, a peek beneath the sensationalist headlines reveals deeper problems at play — ones that stretch across the entirety of the capital’s theatre scene, from the big name West End theatres to the smaller ones dotted around the city’s boroughs.
According to The Stage, the average top ticket price for plays rose 50 per cent between 2023 and 2024 — from £94.45 to £141.61. Two decades ago, even the highest-priced West End tickets were only going for between £50-60; that’s quite a leap.
It’s not just the high-end tickets, either: perhaps more worryingly, the average cheapest ticket price rose too, from £24.58 to £30.55. According to The Stage’s snap survey, these bottom-line ticket prices are rising at around 25 per cent a year. When wages aren’t increasing at the same rate, that’s quite a hit to the average audience member’s pocket.
Inflation-busting dynamics
While that may be the case, the assumption that all tickets will set you back hundreds of pounds, as some reports have seemed to suggest, is simply not true. “The headlines are misleading,” Patrick Gracey of the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) tells me firmly. SOLT data suggests that the majority of West End tickets sold last year were for £56 or less, and fewer than 4 per cent exceeded £150 in price.
While ticket prices have gone up, he says they’ve increased less than inflation over the past few years — though, as Angela Wachner (co-CEO at the Bush Theatre) wrote for us earlier this year, that doesn’t mean much when people also feel poorer thanks to rising costs and stagnating wages.
Plus, while tickets may have increased less than inflation in the last few years, they’ve certainly increased more than that in the last few decades. As theatre critic Lyn Gardner wrote in The Stage, back in July 1984, a ticket to see Evita would have cost £3. Adjusting for inflation, that would mean today’s tickets should cost around a tenner, but instead entry-level tickets were from £29.50.
There’s also another phantom to contend with when it comes to ticket prices: dynamic pricing. Basically, the higher the demand is, the higher prices are jacked up in response. The same seats (E1-2) for Paddington cost £227 on opening night, and £130 for a less-busy, February date. Cheaper tickets do exist, of course — tickets can be bought from £32, but tend to be snapped up in seconds. People wanting those gold dust West End tickets need to be committed and organised, logging on the day they go live to beat the rush.
How to get cheaper theatre tickets
Play it smart
Book early
Find out the day the tickets go on sale — the dates are well publicised online — and go in as soon as booking opens.
Go (theatre) clubbing
Sign up to become a seat filler — and receive free or heavily discounted tickets — at My Box Office or The Audience Club (they often charge a small annual fee).
Bring a friend (or nine)
Many shows offer discounts for group bookings, so just gather your closest friends and see the prices tumble.
Hit Leicester Square
TKTS is central London’s only not-for-profit ticket booth. New on-the-day tickets are released each day.
Rush baby rush
Many venues release discounted tickets the morning of a performance — turn up at the box office or go online: TodayTix app has a rush tickets section.
Go over the river
The National Theatre is generally cheaper than its commercial West End counterparts. And between 12.30pm and 1pm each Friday a button appears on the theatre’s website with £10 tickets.
This complicated landscape is constantly changing, driven by a maelstrom of competing factors. One of those is celebrity bookings, which suddenly seem to be everywhere.
That’s just this year. Would you have paid £300 to see Eddie Redmayne play the Emcee in Cabaret in 2023, or Matt Smith rail against the capitalist machine in Enemy of the People (tickets costing £175)? Even though Andrew Scott told journalists he believed that theatre should “not remain an elitist art form”, tickets for his production of Vanya still went for up to £172.50.
Clearly, actors are sick of this too. In the same conversation, Scott went on to explain that, “No matter how zeitgeisty or how modern you think your play is, if you are having to spend £150, no person between the age of 16-25 or beyond is going to be able to afford that.” And they’re not the only ones: with living costs skyrocketing, most couples, regardless of age, would likely not be able to justify paying £300 for a pair of tickets.
Celebs and the stage go back decades, of course, but it does seem that high-end productions are increasingly making star hires to draw in audiences wanting to see their favourite celeb up close. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if the play is good: Tom Holland’s Romeo drew mixed reviews, but it still sold out. In two hours, in fact, with prices going up to £345.
Factor in limited run times — sometimes only a few weeks, depending on a celebrity’s schedule — and what you have is insane demand for only a couple of thousand seats. As people flock to book tickets at base value, many of the big theatres will use dynamic pricing to jack prices up still further.
“It definitely is something we’re all talking about… you’ve got this storm of, ‘We’re going to bring in a celebrity to be in the show, so we’re going to do dynamic pricing and then tickets will become 300 pounds per seat,’” notes Katharine Farmer, a producer and associate artist at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney.
It’s such a shame the Government doesn’t see how important the arts are
Katharine Farmer
“The top prices are only triggered when shows start selling exceptionally well,” he said. “Romeo & Juliet went on sale with a top price of £145 — but once shows begin to sell out there’s a trend for selling the remaining tickets for insane prices. It’s licensed touting, essentially.”
But make no mistake: this isn’t (just) a callous cash grab. If ticket prices are rising, it’s because theatres are increasingly struggling to make ends meet. When the Covid pandemic hit, theatres lost all their revenue overnight. And as they’ve struggled to claw back profits and attract audiences, another storm has hit: the cost of living crisis.
“It’s been really tough post-Covid,” Wachner tells me. The 180-seat Bush, which champions new voice plays, doesn’t use dynamic pricing and has made an effort to keep its tickets affordable, but that’s come at a cost: “Prices for everything have increased. Materials for making shows, wages, NI contributions: all of those things have just kept rolling in.”
When added up, they make a play expensive to run. An average production in the West End costs around £1-2m to put on — an astronomical sum. Musicals can have weekly running costs of up to £400,000, and plays up to £200,000.
“Theatre is an incredibly labour intensive sector,” Gracey tells me. “A major musical in the West End might require 150 people every night.”
The problem isn’t just endemic to the larger venues. While it costs less to run plays at the smaller theatres — Farmer estimates that productions at the Arcola cost between £40,000 and £100,000 — that money still needs to be recouped in ticket prices.
Combine that with a decrease in government funding and what many theatres are facing is a perfect storm. Since 2010, public funding for the arts has been cut by a staggering 48 per cent.
“We are definitely feeling the squeeze where there are fewer pots available for money and the pots that are available are very, very competitive,” Farmer says. Her theatre has intentionally not raised its ticket prices at all this year, but is still hard-pressed to find funding.
“It’s such a shame that the Government doesn’t see how important the arts are in terms of bringing communities together and representation — and that cultural legacy, as supporting the next generation of talent.”
There was hope when the Government announced plans to investigate dynamic prices following the furore around the Oasis ticket sales, where prices doubled to as much as £355. However, new rules announced last month only compel companies to be more open about dynamic pricing with fans.
And while government funding is doubtful to increase any time soon, it is possible to enjoy London’s theatre delights without breaking the bank. Away from the hype around the buzziest shows, places like the Arcola and Bush offer tickets for as little as £10.
Even the Globe offers £5 tickets for groundlings. Everywhere you look, there is a genuine willingness to keep theatre accessible to all ages and demographics. Nevertheless, unless there’s genuine intervention, ticket prices will keep going up. It goes without saying, but that would be a shame for everyone.