Stephen Mangan has waded into the row surrounding London's theatre ticket prices, warning the West End could turn into a “playground for rich people”. The Green Wing star, 58, claimed London is rapidly veering into New York's Broadway territory with its prices and asked: “Who can afford £250 for one ticket?”
Rising ticket costs
Celebrities and directors have been calling out the astronomical price of tickets in recent months, with shows like Rosamund Pike's play Inter Alia topping £298 and Sarah Jessica Parker's West End debut in Plaza Suite costing £395. Mangan is currently starring in a 14-week run of The Truth, Florian Zeller's marital comedy, at the Apollo theatre, where tickets range from £20 to £115.
“Some theatre tickets are eye-wateringly expensive,” Mangan told The Times. “But you find that in sporting events, in restaurants, it's a problem across the board. I sometimes see a show I want to go and see and look at the price and think, who can afford £250 for one ticket? We don't want to end up like Broadway. If theatre becomes a playground for very rich people, it will become incredibly dull, incredibly quickly.”
Audience behaviour
Mangan also hit out at the behaviour of some theatre goers, echoing Pike, who recently berated an audience member for texting during the finale of her West End performance. Pike, who plays a Crown Court judge in Inter Alia at the Wyndham's Theatre, returned to the stage after the curtain had fallen to tell the texter they had “broken the bond between cast and audience”.
Mangan said theatre goers who text “act like they're not in the same room” as the actors onstage, pointing out that the cast can see when they pull out their phone. He added that he “kicked an audience member's feet off the stage” after the person in the front row propped them up during his Broadway play, The Norman Conquests, in 2009.
Price surge data
The most expensive tickets to plays have risen by five per cent from the previous year, The Stage magazine revealed in a survey last year. Giant, starring John Lithgow as Roald Dahl, had a ticket going for £436, The Times reported. The average top ticket price for plays rose 50 per cent between 2023 and 2024 — from £94.45 to £141.61. Two decades ago, even the highest-priced West End tickets were only going for between £50-60.
It's not just the high-end tickets, either — the average cheapest ticket price rose too, from £24.58 to £30.55. According to The Stage's snap survey, these bottom-line ticket prices are rising at around 25 per cent a year.
Industry voices
David Tennant, 55, dubbed ticket costs “ludicrous” and warned that theatres were “strangling” out a younger audience. “Obviously I would like to imagine that's something that everyone should be allowed to enjoy, and yet when I'm in a show in the West End, I'm aware that there are tickets selling for ludicrous amounts of money,” he said. “But they get sold, at which point you think, ‘Well, what's the theatre management meant to do?’ If it's a commercial enterprise, should they be expected to give tickets away? The danger is you're strangling the next generation of an audience coming through.”
Nadia Fall, the artistic director of the Young Vic, also blasted the “eye watering” rise in theatre ticket prices. Speaking in April, she said £200 tickets becoming commonplace gives “heartburn” to her and the artists involved to put on a production that justifies the cost. “It does make my eyes water and it does make me a little bit frightened when I look at Broadway and I see tickets for $400 being the norm, up to $700,” she said, as reported by The Times.
