A night at the theatre is not just about what takes place on stage. As with all forms of entertainment, the peripheral details can enhance or detract from the experience considerably. The tall man who takes the seat in front of you, the mobile phone that keeps going off three rows behind, the ridiculous queue for the ladies' loos: these are all things that can dent your enjoyment of a show. A trip to the theatre bar can be one of the worst offenders. Let's face it: if you only receive a few pennies in change after handing over a tenner for a glass of dry white, it's bound to take the shine off your evening.
Why are theatre bars so insidiously overpriced? A quick G&T during the interval should be a pleasurable thing, an integral part of the theatre-going ritual along with buying a programme and an interval ice cream. More often than not, it simply sees you divested of a considerable amount of cash in exchange for a drink of usually mediocre quality.
Then there are the places that take your money 10 minutes before the curtain goes up, cheerfully decant your purchase into a plastic tumbler, then tell you that you can't take your drink into the auditorium. Yes, I'm speaking from experience here.
These seem like small quibbles, but in terms of ticket prices alone, a night at a West End show is already a prohibitively expensive affair for many. Factor in the cost of transport, a pre-theatre meal and, yes, a round of drinks in the bar during the interval, and you can be looking at a hefty bill. It's enough to put many people off going to the theatre with anything approaching regularity, if at all.
Away from the West End, there are some very nice theatre bars. The refurbished Young Vic has a lovely terrace, ditto the Hammersmith Lyric. Many fringe theatres are conveniently attached to pubs, some more symbiotically than others. But on Shaftesbury Avenue, the bars - like the buildings that house them - are rather stuck in the past.
This doesn't have to be the case. As Cameron Mackintosh pointed out when discussing his recent theatre refurbishment projects in the West End, people would be more inclined to visit more often if "you could have a drink, get a snack, and it wasn't hell to have a pee - that might encourage them to come back one or two times more".
So which theatres boast a brilliant bar - and which are the worst offenders?
