One of my favourite moments from any play – if only I could remember which one – is when a character in a restaurant snaps his fingers at a passing employee and shouts "Hey, actor, I'd like to order." Needless to say every waiter in the premises immediately turns his head in reflexive recognition.
If the latest plan to open a revamped Theatre Museum in the style of Planet Hollywood and staffed by unemployed thesps gets the go-ahead, this exchange may soon be a daily occurrence. The new venture, spearheaded by Geoff Morrow, entrepreneur and former songwriter for Elvis Presley, would combine the archive, a glitzy dining area fringed by theatre memorabilia, and live shows staged daily by its employees. There's even talk of incorporating a drama school for potential recruits.
The original Theatre Museum closed in 2007 after its parent institution, the V&A, withdrew funding. Defenders of the enterprise pointed to the 18,000 children a year who passed through its doors, but the fact that this number would barely match a second division football attendance on a Saturday afternoon speaks eloquently of its trundling appeal.
Museums are funny things. I've been to some crackers (the Grimsby trawler museum being the best) and some shockers (the hubristic Imperial War Museum North in Manchester). And although it hurts me to say this, given the passion and integrity of its administrators, it's hard to imagine that the new Theatre Museum could make a worse job of things than the doomed enterprise it seeks to replace. I visited the original several times, and my recollection is that it was quite the most forgettable example of the genre (and I'm including the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick).
With piecemeal displays, old props and curling photographs of Laurence Olivier, it always seemed to have the smell of death and fustication about it. Buried in the bowels of Covent Garden, the entrance itself was enough to make you lose the will to live, an endless descent down a series of narrow ramps to a tinny soundtrack of an audience laughing, at the end of which all that greeted you was a series of gloomy, subterranean chambers.
Perhaps the problem is the ephemeral nature of the subject. Michael Billington observed that the British are better at making theatre than celebrating it, yet perhaps the dichotomy is that unlike TV or film, the live medium is best stored in the human memory.
Of course the West End needs an enterprise celebrating its culture and traditions, but the sheer scale of this new £6m proposal worries me. Restaurant? Live shows? Drama school? There aren't enough jobs to justify the ones already in existence, let alone adding to the number of graduates being pumped out annually.
Still, I wish the new venture well. Although if the meal I recently endured at Planet Hollywood is anything to go by, any dinner show would do well to avoid songs from Grease.
