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The London Assembly’s ‘Get Into London Theatre’ campaign has been overhauled for its 2004 launch this week. The new campaign, supported by £350,000 from the London Development Agency, has been divided into two distinct strands: a ticketing promotion designed to stimulate London’s leisure economy, and a separate audience development initiative.
The ticketing campaign is being co-ordinated by Visit London, the agency responsible for marketing London as a tourist destination. Running until the end of March, the campaign offers price reductions on more than 70 shows at venues throughout the capital. No subsidy will be used to support the price reductions and costs will be borne by producers and venues. Other elements of the promotion will include restaurant and hotel deals as well as discounted rail travel. While last year’s campaign set out to encourage Londoners to visit the theatre, this year’s stated aim is to attract visitors from across the UK into the West End. In packaging theatre tickets with other leisure activities, the organisers hope to be able to sell what a spokesperson for Visit London referred to as “wallet-friendly weekend breaks”.

The Society of London Theatre (SOLT), which is overseeing the whole campaign, is currently formulating the audience development strand. Paul James of SOLT commented. “Price promotion is valuable but proved to be a blunt instrument with regard to audience development”. An audience development programme will run from March for several months and is likely to draw on existing work being carried out by London venues and companies.

The ‘Get Into London Theatre’ scheme was initially launched in 2002 in response to the fall in tourist numbers after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Last year’s ticket promotion, described as a “London success story” by mayor Ken Livingstone, was criticised by the London Assembly’s Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee for failing to fulfil its stated objective of getting non-attenders into theatres, and instead subsidising the attendance of regular West End theatre goers. The scheme was also criticised for the substantial proportion of grant funding that was used to subsidise ticket price reductions. Meg Hillier, Chair of the Committee, described the 2003 campaign as suffering from “woolly objectives, an absence of rigorous evaluation and questionable claims of success”. First time theatregoers bought only 17 of every 1,000 tickets sold through the campaign while 50% of the tickets were bought by people who already attended once a month. While the Committee voiced faith that this year’s funding will be targeted at “the objective of diversified theatre audiences”, it appears that the majority of the £350,000 funding for the campaign will be spent on promoting and administering the ticketing aspect. Limited evaluation was carried out of the previous ‘Get Into London Theatre’ schemes, but £25,000 has been earmarked for the evaluation of this year’s campaign.