News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1241: 7 December 2025
Editorial
As we creep towards the end of another year, it is usual at this point to start looking back; we will certainly be doing plenty of that in our reviews of this year, but just five years ago, theatres were terrified that they would lose their pantos and Christmas shows if more lockdowns were announced.
If you remember, that was when different parts of the country were put into different tiers according to the spread of COVID, and here in Manchester, as in London, theatres were forced to shut for the rest of the year, despite having taken every possible precaution to keep audiences—and performers and staff—safe. I didn’t see the inside of a theatre again until the following May, 15 months after I had seen my last live show.
I mentioned last week the report from the British Theatre Consortium, authored by playwrights Dan Rebellato and David Edgar, into the effects of COVID on the theatre industry and promised we would be looking at this in more detail this week.
Philip Fisher has analysed the 143-page report for his latest feature. Also, I spoke to Professor Rebellato the day after the report was released for this week’s new podcast episode. While the report itself does its best to be objective, we indulged in a bit of speculation and talked around the issues raised by the report.
The study took data from theatres around the country from two years, 2019 and 2023, and examined the differences between them, but the BTC also produced reports on the British theatre repertoire in 2013 and 2014, so between them, they give a picture of the changes in the industry over more than a decade.
In that time, new writing is starting to recover with new musicals being a particular winner, plays by women have gained ground, musicals have increased as a percentage of tickets sold, the number of productions went down but they had longer runs on average and, contrary to popular perception, ticket prices on average have reduced in real terms and audiences are not booking later than they used to.
I spoke to Dan about some of the consequences of the pandemic that weren’t necessarily covered by the statistics, such as the loss of people who left the industry, especially those freelancers who weren’t eligible for furlough, and the apparent increase in the number of co-productions and death of rep seasons and the effects of both of these on audience choice and the tourist and hospitality businesses in the area surrounding the theatres.
While the conclusion of the report is a tribute to the people responsible for running theatres, as they adapted impressively as the situation changed, sometimes daily, and defied the predictions of widespread closures in the industry, the knock-on effects are still with us. The announcement this week that the RSC is to get rid of up to 90 jobs probably has its roots in the events of 2020.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in this newsletter about the e-ticket, which saw a rise during the pandemic and seems to be here to stay. The online programme is another victim of this—holding your phone up to a QR code to see something online that will probably have disappeared within a few months is just not the same, and certainly not something you will be able to look back on nostalgically years later.
One I saw this week not only had one of these online programmes, but in order to see it, you had to enter your e-mail address to sign up to a mailing list, which surely raises some privacy concerns. Even ‘free’ programmes have a price to pay.
This week, I will be seeing my second A Christmas Carol of the season and my first and second pantos—which are both from the same company at different venues. Should be a fun week!
Polish-American coloratura soprano Alexandra Nowakowski will sing Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, one of the highlights of the 2026 Buxton International Festival.
Polish-American coloratura soprano Alexandra Nowakowski will sing Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, one of the highlights of the 2026 Buxton International Festival.
Freaky Friday Paul Taylor-Mills in association with Sean Nyberg and HOME, J Douglas Waterman, Madison Mohn, Storyworks Live, Wallace-Wojta and Willette & Manny Klausner at HOME Manchester
