First-rate performance ... Felicity Kendal in Amy's View. Photograph: Tristram Kenton.
How many of you out there say how much you love the theatre and never go? Some even put it on your CV under hobbies and interests, hoping you won't be asked to name what you have seen recently. Although if you are asked you can, perhaps, say Billy Elliot or the Lion King.
There is a scene in Amy's View, the David Hare play that opened in the west end on Monday, where Esme is arguing with her unpleasant son-in-law about theatre. It's a declining irrelevant art form, he basically contends to the character of Felicity Kendal, a veteran stage actress.
It is a terrific production - funny and completely engaging with a first-rate performance from Kendal. Just read Michael Billington's review. It deserves to do well and complete its intended run but there is a worry in people's stomachs that it won't. Straight drama is just not doing well in the west end - both Bent with Alan Cumming, and Summer and Smoke with Rosamund Pike have undeservedly closed early.
Meanwhile, pound signs are rotating on the eyeballs of producers behind the string of musicals that have saturated London. Last week, audiences hyperventilated over the latest one, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Sound of Music, while at Amy's View there was appreciative but reserved applause. It is not all disaster for straight drama: Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll is still doing okay and it will be a real surprise if Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon does not at least run its course. But they are not doing anywhere near as good business as the musicals - and producers, in their more pessimistic moments, talk about straight drama being an endangered species in the West End.
Perhaps we get the theatre we deserve. Straight drama will close unless people go and see it. There might be a lot of good drama on the TV and at the pictures but there is even better stuff on stage if people would just make the effort.
