Nice show, shabby theatre

Can you still get afternoon tea brought to your seat?" asks my elegant Park Avenue friend. She wants to know whether a seasonal visit to London's Theatreland will be worth her while, and she is right to be wary.

However good the show, a visit to one of London's crumbling, dank and leaky West End theatres is an expensive and often downright shabby experience. Matinee tea is a distant memory from an era when the comfort of bums on seats was as important as the revenue they brought in.

Tickets for many top London shows now top out at £55, virtually the same as Broadway's $100, and the Arts Council estimates that childcare, food and transport add an estimated £53.77 per person to the cost of an evening out.

For this, you get to sit in a seat that probably hasn't been replaced or reupholstered for years, where legroom (especially in the "gods") can be less than the 26 inches demanded by the Civil Aviation Authority for short-haul flights.

More than likely, that uncomfortable seat will be in a building that has received the bare minimum of maintenance for decades, where whatever money has been spent has gone on the cosmetic touching-up of gold paint or worn velvet in the auditorium, or on the historic frontage, rather than on improving loos, bars and communal areas.

The £25.8 million that was spent on refurbishing the Royal Court by the time it reopened in 2000, for instance, far exceeded the total sum that had been spent on the five theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue in the preceding five years.

Act Now, a 2003 report from the Theatre's Trust, estimated that £250 million needed to be spent over the next 20 years to keep London's unique stock of Victorian, Edwardian and inter-war theatres functioning.

This is not simple neglect, though, but simple economics. As a subsidised theatre, the Royal Court could apply for Lottery money. As commercial entities, the main theatre-owning groups (the Ambassadors Theatre Group, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Company, Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, Clear Channel and new kids on the block Nimax, co-owned by Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer) cannot, nor are they eligible for government grants.

They are also bound to pay dividends to shareholders if they happen to make money either from leasing their theatres or (given that most of the aforementioned groups are producers as well as proprietors), staging shows in the uncertain world of entertainment.

The £781,948 that the Ambassadors Theatre Group earned after tax in 2003 would barely have covered the cost of replacing all the lightbulbs in the 11 theatres it then either owned or managed. The same year, the Really Useful Group made a profit of only £399,000 after payouts to shareholders.