THEATRE
The hot ticket
Jez Butterworth’s new play The River, directed by Ian Rickson, opens at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on October 18. Butterworth and Rickson’s last project together at the theatre was the award-winning Jerusalem, which became an international hit and transferred to Broadway, and the play’s star Dominic West – well-known for his role in TV series The Wire – will draw crowds too. So how is the Royal Court going to handle these hot tickets? Venue spokesman Anna Evans explains why they’re trying out a new ticketing strategy: you can only buy tickets for The River on the day of performance.
Have you used this ticketing system before? This is the first time we have tried doing this. We anticipated demand would be very high for the show, so we really want to ensure that the tickets are sold as democratically as possible. We currently sell £10 Monday tickets on the day of performance and we also held day seats for the sold-out show Constellations. For that, we had positive feedback from audience members who were pleased to have access to sold-out performances – but this is the first time that we have done it for all performances.
What is the thinking behind the system? As the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs only seats about 80 people, if we had put the show on sale in the usual way, it could have sold out within a very short period of time. There wouldn’t have even been enough tickets for all our friends and supporters and therefore the production would only be open to a few people in the know.We felt this was the fairest way to allow the widest number of people access to tickets.
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