So this year's Proms are now finished, thereby ending for another year an increasingly revelatory alternative to nights spent in a playhouse. It seems to me that cultural life doesn't get much better than hearing Vladimir Jurowski conduct Stravinsky's Firebird. As I enjoyed a belated flurry of Proms, one thought struck me over and over: this sort of immersion in the full range and breadth of classical music, before such a devoted and (for the most part) attentive audience, is simply unimaginable in the theatre.
That willingness to think on a level both exalted and populist, to entertain the very audience that it treats as adults, makes the Proms singular in their own right, while throwing down the gauntlet to other art forms to follow suit.
Of course there are obvious differences that work against the theatre ever having a meaningful equivalent, not least the exigencies of production - sets, costumes, lighting - that would make it infernally difficult to showcase a different piece nightly for two months as the Proms manages so deftly. But it's the sheer reach of the Proms that astonishes: not just the 6,000 or so people who are capable of packing out the Albert Hall but the untold others who watch broadcasts on TV or catch various performances on the radio or online.
There's long been the concern that the theatre audience is increasingly ghettoised or fragmented. Look at the success, for instance, of Covent Garden's 250-seat Donmar in selling out production after production to a select few even as those rare straight plays that brave the West End, and the larger auditoriums that go with it, struggle to sustain a run. The theatre world can gather together a crowd for the occasional one-off - Andrew Lloyd Webber's birthday concert is a recent example. But 6,000 people all thronging at once to Robert Lepage's Lipsynch? I doubt it, even if Lepage is among the few theatre artists who actually does think big. No wonder Las Vegas snapped him up.
By comparison with the Proms, theatrical special events tend to happen beneath the radar. It's as if the very heft and presence of the Proms would be somehow anathema within the more rarefied theatrical hothouse where big means arena performances of Les Miserables, not Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.
The Royal Court has embarked upon a scintillating sequence of readings in honour of the playwright Caryl Churchill's 70th birthday. But those will play, presumably, to a coterie public already initiated into the fold, just as the Factory Theatre Hamlet continues on a tour of venues that quite deliberately forsakes the press, unless Josh Hartnett happens to drops by. The message otherwise: you find out about us. And if not? Tough luck.
You could argue that the Edinburgh Festival turns the Scottish city into one large theatrical prom, and the cultural avidity in the air there helps define the one place where I have experienced daily the large-scale hunger for serious quality performance that marks out the Proms. But surely the theatre can raise its head above the parapet, celebrating strength and diversity writ large as the Proms annually do. The Olympics are nearing. (Will there be a special Proms commission to mark that occasion, one wonders?) If there were ever a time for the theatre world to think big, it's now.
