News today that the A Night Less Ordinary scheme has burned through its two-year comms budget in little more than a year (HT: North London arts correspondent Dr Lise Smith).
To put it in context, this is an Arts Council England scheme that orginally proposed over two years to give away a million theatre tickets to people under 26; revised this to around 600,000 shortly after launch; and in its first year appears to have spent its entire comms budget giving away just 175,000 of those. Why then is it so hard to give away something as valuable as a theatre ticket? Why, indeed, does it seem impossible for anyone to ever price tickets for a live event even vaguely right?
There are specific problems with this offer. It is not, of course, a carte blanche for anyone under 26 to turn up to any West End show without paying. The offer is limited to 5 tickets per eligible person over the two years of the scheme. More to the point, people who have tried to use it comment that on applying they have been told by the theatre "turn up and hope we have tickets"...which, as they point out, assumes that the young are irresponsible and never make plans beyond turning up for something on a whim. Or indeed that their time is not valuable and they should be prepared to stand outside a theatre for an unspecified number of nights in the uncertain hope of a ticket being free.
And there indeed seems to be the crux of the problem. To ACE, it's a way to get young people interested in theatre. But to theatres, it's a way of filling seats that they are really sure would otherwise stand empty, and to the lucky free ticket recipients, it is an opportunity to stand in queus for longer than the ticket is worth. (If they assume the tickets are usually priced rationally and assume mediocrity about the value of their time, in fact they can pretty much guarantee this.) A free ticket sounds like a good deal; a free ticket if you're willing to turn up every night until one is available should obviously be avoided.
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