PLAYS & PAUSE

EARLIER THIS YEAR, George Clooney's stage adaptation of the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck raked in $3.28 million in its first week.

- VAISHALI DAR

It broke its own previous record as the highest-grossing non-musical play on Broadway. The play played to 100% capacity, even with an average ticket price of nearly $300 (about ₹25,000). Across town, another Broadway revival, Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal's rendition of Shakespeare's Othello, grossed $3.1 million, with average tickets pushing $380 at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City.

Meanwhile in the West End of London, shows like Cock have experimented with dynamic pricing, seeing top-tier seats soar to £400, and average top-price tickets rising by 9% in 2023-24.

Closer home, theatre actor-producer Vidushi Mehra's play Shadowed, inspired by the Hollywood classic Primal Fear, was staged in Delhi last month with ticket prices selling at ₹2,500 per person. Similarly, actor Ashutosh Rana's Humare Ram tour—a theatrical retelling of the Ramayana—has hit 120 house-full nights across 16 cities, with tickets ranging from ₹800 to ₹10,000.

Even though the figures augur well for theatre as a business, it defeats any initiative to broaden and democratize the audiences of an art form that has been an integral part of expression and storytelling for hundreds of years.

Veteran English actor Derek Jacobi had once said that if we want theatre to remain "part of our blood and bones" it should be accessible to all. It doesn't take too long to understand that ticket prices are putting theatre beyond the reach of the masses, making it a pursuit of the moneyed elite.

High costs