Man with a mission | 29 September 2007

Mary Wakefield talks to Jonathan Kent about his plans to jump-start
the West End

Something is rotten in the West End. It’s not just the sour smell of lager, or the Saturday night binge drinkers. It’s more that as I walk up St Martin’s Lane, through what should be the beating heart of theatreland, there’s an unmistakable whiff of artistic decay.

It’s been said before and often, with varying degrees of gloom, but it’s difficult to deny: nearly all the shows on offer here are musicals, and most of them adapted from movies or TV: The Lion King (‘Pure delight floods the Lyceum!’) Bad Girls: The Musical (‘If you’re in for a good time, bad girls do it best!’) The only really talked-about straight play still running in the West End is Elling at Trafalgar Studios. This is unsubsidised, commercial theatre; this is money talking and singing and dancing its way down-market.

There is some cause for hope: Jonathan Kent, the man many think will jump-start a revival of the West End. Kent transformed the Almeida in the Nineties and now he’s taking over the Theatre Royal in Haymarket for a year, putting on three serious, quality productions in the hope of persuading other West End theatres to follow suit. I’m on my way to meet Jonathan Kent now. I stroll past Spamalot (‘Funnier than the Black Death!’) and the big gold Freddie Mercury outside the Dominion Theatre. I have my doubts. I’m not sure even Clark Kent could save the West End now.

Through the swing doors of the American Church on the Tottenham Court Road where Kent is rehearsing, and I wait where I’m told to in an upstairs room. There are stacks of Bibles on the windowsill, and eddies of theatrical chitchat running down the corridor: ‘And he said…and I said…I mean, it’s impossible!…Outrageous!’