Don’t sneer at celebrities on the West End. Plays like Lily James’s Lyonesse are saving theatre

Is there really no such thing as bad publicity? The team behind new West End play Lyonesse may well be pondering that after Clive Davis followed up his one-star review for The Times with another grumpy broadside. Davis argues that the casting of A-listers Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas meant cynical producers could jack up prices while presenting us with “shoddy work”.

Yes, top-end ticket prices are eye-watering (although nothing compared with Broadway), and yes, Lyonesse wouldn’t have opened in the West End without those big names attached. But Davis’s one-star rating is absurd.

Penelope Skinner’s play has definite potential, tackling urgent feminist issues – albeit in a tonally unfocused way – as it follows a film executive (James) who is sent to meet a former star actress (Scott Thomas) who retreated from the spotlight 30 years ago, in order to turn her life story into a film. Sneering at audiences who book for such shows because they’re “too eager to see celebrities in the flesh” strikes me as naïve at best, nastily snobbish at worst.

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After all, star casting is hardly a new practice. And if many of those ticket buyers are agog fans – well, so what? We’re always banging on about the importance of attracting new (and younger, and more diverse) audiences. They might come for a celeb gawp, and then fall in love with theatre.

Nor are the ticket prices for celebrity shows necessarily exclusionary. Right now, you can see the former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying revamp of Sunset Boulevard. That’s the kind of casting bound to bring in new audiences – and Lloyd, a tireless advocate for accessibility, has offered up 5,000 tickets at £20 for the under-thirties, key workers and those receiving government benefits. It means the top-end tickets, which people fascinated to see Scherzinger in action are happy to buy, subsidise a substantial batch of cheap tickets.

Then there’s also the fact that theatre is still recovering from the enormous blow it took during Covid. Many people remain reluctant to swap the safety and convenience of streaming shows at home for journeying to watch a live performance, in a crowd.

Thank goodness, then, for the star names who have played such a vital role in making theatre unmissable again.

Think of Ian McKellen, who last Christmas and at the start of this year toured pantomime Mother Goose around the country for a whopping four months – a huge boost for regional venues at a difficult time.

Elsewhere, the casting of Cheryl in the West End’s 2:22 A Ghost Story in February was an unlikely masterstroke, while the previous month Paul Mescal turned his Oscar buzz into ticket sales for Tennessee Williams. And last April, Jodie Comer went from Killing Eve to one-woman show Prima Facie, which, incidentally, also became the highest-grossing event cinema release, with its National Theatre Live screenings, taking £4.47m. That’s another broken arts medium benefiting from star casting.

As an ardent Succession fan, I’m cock-a-hoop that two of its stars, Brian Cox and Sarah Snook, are coming to the West End in the spring – and yes, I would happily shell out to see them “in the flesh”. I also cheer Matt Smith returning to the London stage in February in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with fans of Doctor Who, The Crown and Game of Thrones following in his wake.

Theatre is a business as well as an art form, and it still needs financial help. But rather than competing with each other, its commercial and artistic demands can work gloriously in parallel: think of Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley leading the critically acclaimed and still very popular revival of Cabaret at The Kit Kat Club at London’s Playhouse theatre.

Of course we should be honest when shows fail to meet those standards. Returning to Lyonesse, perhaps it would have had a better home somewhere like London’s Royal Court, one of the venues where Penelope Skinner’s previous work ran – not least because there would have been more time to develop it, away from the financial pressures of the West End.

But simply sticking Lyonesse in the pillory is counterproductive: it puts off both audiences and performers who might take a gamble on new theatre.

This topic deserves a nuanced conversation – not a mob hurling rotten fruit.