Why the West End is a nightmare

Frustrated: Writer/producer Nick Moran

10 April 2012

Picture, if you will, a queue outside a popular nightspot. Personalities in neutral, waiting for the bouncer to allow one in as one comes out. Propped on the railings, in a shorter queue, but in the same boat, tired and a little drunk, is yours truly. Well this could be any night.

A man pops out, carrying a crash helmet. The front of the queue comes to life. "Really enjoyed the play, Nick. Going to write another one?" "No," I respond. "Why not?" "Because it's been a f***ing nightmare." I follow with a surge of acrid complaints about everyone in theatre until eventually I run out of steam. "That's a shame," he says.

The chap with the lid is a journalist, the play is Telstar, the thing that has become my life's work, and the event is the after-show party of our charity gala last week, which I'd been working on for some weeks and for the previous 18 hours straight. So, as co-writer, co-producer and that berk who says the wrong thing to journalists, my rant has put all three size eights in all three mouths.

Of course, I had no intention of insulting anyone involved with the production, but my frustration is genuine. Getting a new play on in the West End and, more to the point, trying to keep it there, is a nightmare. Or perhaps more like an impossible computer game: virtual producer.

Telstar started life about eight years ago when, as an underemployed, bilious actor, I started writing the stage biography of Joe Meek. The world's first independent record producer, Meek has a fascinating London story. A gay, speed-addicted farm boy who dabbled in the black arts, he built a recording studio in his tiny flat over a handbag shop on the Holloway Road.

His songs were apparently often written via seances by the spirit of Buddy Holly, and Meek had three number ones in the early Sixties, including the instrumental Telstar, which became the biggest selling record of all time and the first British number one on both sides of the Atlantic.

It brought him fame, an Ivor Novello song award and sh ou ld have brought him a fortune. But a law suit, a gay sex scandal, bad luck and terrible business sense (he turned down the Beatles three times) reduced him to a penniless, heartbroken, drug-addicted agoraphobic.

In a fit of paranoia, he killed his landlady and blew his own head off with a shotgun, only three years after being crowned the king of British pop.

Part Greek tragedy, part kitchen sink drama, with sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll thrown in, this seemed to me to be the greatest story never told. I obsessively began work on the idea, and with the help of my best and funniest friend, James Hicks, our play took shape, along with our dreams of staging it in the West End.

People laughed; but it finally opened at the New Ambassadors in June. And we got some great reviews - not all, of course, but a couple of definite raves - and the audiences seem to enjoy it: nine weeks into our 12-week run, we still get standing ovations.

It was hard enough raising the money to get the play into a West End theatre, following our regional tour. We had Con O'Neill, who is the youngest ever Olivier Award-winner and, everyone agrees, outstanding in the role of Meek, but not a Hollywood star name; no one knew the play, and there were no songs in it.

So, where no other West End management dared to tread, it was Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan, followed by other investors, who took the leap of faith and helped us make it happen. "The West End is dead"; "the West End is alive"; "the West End is rubbish" are declarations we are all used to hearing. They're never right, and never wrong.

But what the more thoughtful commentators add to the debate is that the West End needs new drama. And new plays are the most difficult to make work commercially.

It is worth mentioning that Telstar is currently the only new piece of writing in the West End. There is a tremendous difference between commercial and subsidised theatre. Places like the Royal Court and the National have always been the breeding ground for new writing. Sometimes plays transfer to the commercial sector, as Elmina's Kitchen did this year, but they are developed with a commercial safety net and a lot of support. They certainly feel the pinch when they move.

So here's the source of my frustration. To be blunt, it's ticket sales. It's getting the audience in. It's getting to a potential audience. It's telling them we're here and we've got something they might like. The big - probably one and only - chance for most productions is opening night.

Critics might not have the power to make or break a show with Judi Dench as its star, but for most of us, first-night reviews are the major marketing moment that could make all the difference.

I sometimes think that the all-powerful critics wear ever-so-slightly rose-tinted specs when they are at the Court or Donmar, rather than applying the crystal clear scrutiny with which they examine West End drama.

There are certainly juicier stonings to be read in West End reviews. (It can be like The Weakest Link: you are the weakest show. Goodbye. I learned that from The Countess, which I appeared in for three weeks before it closed at the Criterion.)

But Telstar hasn't been slammed by the critics. I just feel that the right people don't know about it. At V Festival on Sunday, I was looking around at the milling crowd - a lot of thirty-somethings, like me. These, I thought, are the people I'd like to see my play. There's a whole generation out there now who have never even been to the theatre. Where do we go from here?

Events over the summer have not been helpful; the whole of Shaftesbury Avenue is suffering. But getting the hip crowd into the West End to see a new play is difficult. And I have tried.

I didn't go to producer school and it shows. At one marketing meeting, I was told: "Some of your ideas are great Nick, but some are bollocks." I thought that giving away condoms in gay clubs could have been a plan...

For one night, at least, at our charity gala last week, for Teenage Cancer Trust and CHASE Hospice Care for Children, my dream came true, and I watched as the full-house - a young crowd, without much grey hair in sight - cheered a new play in the West End. We are going to have to find ways to make every night like that. And soon.

Why the West End is a nightmare

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