EleanorTurney.co.uk

The free tickets scheme for under-26s launches on Monday. My colleague and I are already plotting our assault on the website, and have every intention of getting as many freebies as is humanly possible. I will be blogging on our experiences – how easy/hard it is to actually get hold of tickets, how different theatres are handling the scheme, whether what we see is any good – on the ArtsProfessional website, and as usual, would welcome comments and information on other people’s experiences, too.

I am not filled with hope at the moment, I have to say. Call me a cynic, but there’s just not enough money behind it to give away tickets without damaging theatres’ revenue. I know that makes me hypocritical for using and abusing the system, but it’s free! And I’ve only not been a student for sixth months, and free stuff makes me happy. Very happy. I’ve noticed already, though, that the Young Vic are limiting people to one booking per year (although you can book up to six tickets at a time, provided each ticket goes to a named under-26 who turns up on the night with ID), and The National’s link from the Arts Council’s website doesn’t work and its own website strangely carries no mention of it. The National, the RSC and the Young Vic all already do their own cheap ticket deals (The National’s Travelex tickets are a tenner, and available to anyone, the RSC do £5 tickets for every show on a first-come first-served basis with at least ten available on the day, and the Young Vic offer £5 to Southwark residents and £10 to students and under-26s anyway), and it will be interesting to see whether these have more or fewer takers. I hope that people who try and book a freebie and miss out will be tempted to book for a small fee anyway, but we shall see.

I’m slightly annoyed that I’ve already booked, for real money, almost everything that I want to see at participating theatres in the next few months, but I only have myself to blame. There’s some good stuff coming up at the National, and a free ticket makes the prospect of paying the train fare to London and dashing to catch the last train home again much more appealing. I’m still upset that the only venue in Cambridge that’s participating is The Junction, when everything good seems to be at the Arts Theatre, especially given that the Arts Theatre’s student/young person reductions are pitiful and never seem to apply to anything I want to see. On a tangential note, the worst culprit for student deals that I have come across is the Theatre Royal, Bath, which takes a quid off prices. A whole quid. Unsurprisingly, it is not offering freebies, either.

Now, I like freebies as much as the next recently-graduated student, and so at first glance, Arts Council England’s new free tickets for under-26s scheme sounds like a god-send. Well, if Andy Burnham is your god. I love theatre but can rarely afford it at the moment, what with living in the sticks* where theatre is limited and thus having to add train fare to any ticket price. Two years of free tickets at any one of 95 venues across the country (which are currently looking like being pretty concentrated in the big smoke on account of there being so bloody many theatres in London), starting in March, when I will have reached the ripe old age of 22. Sounds pretty bloody good, especially when you read that theatres that sign up will have to guarantee a small percentage of freebies for every show, and that there is no limit to how many different shows one can see.

However, therein lies the problem. For starters, canny, early-rising bastards like me will snaffle all the free seats before most arty people are out of bed and lighting their first gauloise of the day. Look at ‘Kids’ Week’. A London-based, idea: one week in the summer holidays is Kids’ Week, and West End theatres offer a free child ticket (or possibly two…) with every paying adult. Brilliant – kids get to go to the theatre which I am massively in favour of, and there is one less day in the yawning chasm of summer hols. But, Kids’ Week tickets are severely limited, and sell out in minutes via a confusing and poorly staffed phone line. I think I managed to get a freebie to one event in the four years I was eligible and in London. And that’s the other problem: ‘kids’ covers all under-16s, but the freebie is reliant on having a full paying adult with you. Not only does the adult ticket price for a West End show immediately exclude a large swathe of the population, but the scheme also supposes that every interested child will have an adult willing and able to take them. I’m not advocating sending your 7-yr-old off to Shaftesbury Ave alone, but I see nothing wrong with allowing a group of young teenagers to go to a matinee together without adult supervision.

Continuing down this route, the ACE scheme sounds lovely in principle, in that it offers 16-26s those freebies, but why stop at 26? A representative sample of the population (the other people in my arts magazine office!) are angry that it excludes over 26s – why not have a salary criteria rather than an age criteria? Hell, if I continue to work in the arts I’d be all for the low-waged being given priority treatment! Furthermore, there are some serious economic considerations that seem to have been swept under the carpet. If anyone under 26 is eligible for a free ticket, how are ACE going to collect data about whose bums are sitting on those seats? I’m assuming (fairly, I think, given its track record) that ACE will need to tick boxes in order to justify the money. (Speaking of which, in what world will £2m cover 95 venues offering free seats?) So, people like me who love theatre but are generally broke are likely to snap up the freebies. Given that I actually budget in order to treat myself to shows I really want to see – or persuade friends that what I really want for my birthday is to be taken to Hamlet – a free seat I plonk myself down in is a seat’s worth of revenue lost for that theatre and that show.  I’m not suggesting that no-one new to theatre will take ACE up on its generous offer, but the question that is clamourously echoing across the arts sector at the moment is how to keep newly converted theatre-goers attending once the freebies run out. Any ideas?