Written as a companion to my review of 3 Guys Naked… which can be found here.

On the 1st of December 2015, I went to see an excellent production of 3 Guys Naked from the Waist Down, that almost didn’t happen.

I turned up early, as I often do. This is rarely a problem – there’s always a bar to sit in and read for a bit before the show. However, this being a Tuesday matinee performance, I arrived to find the pub that the theatre sits above closed. Luckily for me, a member of the creative team saw me outside and invited me in. He went to show me to the auditorium to wait, but we found it dimly lit in emergency lighting. The power had gone. So we sat and chatted backstage for a while, before moving to the auditorium, still lit only by half a dozen small fluorescent tubes, to watch the members of the cast and crew assemble for the show.

There I quietly bore witness to another, all too familiar drama.

The director, the assistant director and the stage manager, all somehow unpanicked, strode around trying to contact someone – anyone – that could help them fix the lack of electricity. The theatre manager could not be raised on phone, e-mail or Facebook. Neither could the tech manager. A conga line of people went to scratch their heads over the fuse-box. Eventually, the musical director phoned his father, who has some practical knowledge in these things, and he and the stage manager climbed into the rafters to find open copper wiring and a Gordian Knot of fuses. Nothing could be done.

The thing that was upsetting is that no one was surprised about any of this. They were just more hurdles to overcome. There was discussion of doing the musical theatre show in the poorly-lit auditorium as was, sans tech, sans lighting, sans band – the MD joked that he could sing the instrumental melody along with the cast, a cappella, and I don’t think he was entirely joking.

“The show must go on” is an axiom of theatre that has been made fun of so much that I had almost forgotten what it feels like to be in that position – to have an impossible task ahead of you and shrug in the wake of it, to simultaneously embarrass and impress with bloody-minded stubbornness that your audience will see a show. At one point, Hastings said: “Are we seriously considering this?” Within 5 minutes he was warming up in the dark with the rest of them, barrelling into what then seemed inevitable. The show goes on.

In the end, and I mean the very end, the problem was mostly fixed, by what seemed to be a mile of extension cabling. The show went on, indeed, without some of its effects, and the nervous energy of the hour and a half leant itself to a great performance.

If the cast and creative of 3 Guys Naked… were paid for their time and effort on the production, it probably wasn’t minimum wage, and it certainly wasn’t union rates. So why do they do it, you may ask yourself. Because it’s important, and it feels important. I’m glad, and you should be glad, that they do do it. This was the first production of 3 Guys Naked… in the UK for 26 years, and it was excellent. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone involved, as well as anyone who makes theatre like this happen despite the molehills and the mountains in their way. I offer no easy economic solutions here – that is not my field of expertise. But I will say that London’s thriving theatre community is not merely one of the best things about the city, but it is a link to a shared cultural history that we cannot afford to weaken.

Everyone has eleventh hour stresses in their lives: at work, at weddings, the school run, catching your plane, the list is endless. But what I saw on that Tuesday was unfair, unsafe and totally avoidable.

I said this was “all too familiar”. Why is that the case? Why do we allow such high prices for tickets, when the theatre doesn’t use that money to pay a fair wage or, in some cases, even ensure a safe working place? Why do we all just accept that you have to work for free in the arts? There has been a lot of talk recently about the middle and upper classes dominating the arts – you might solve this by paying people. Moreover, indenturing artists to slavery for their art will cause nothing but resentment. Most will be driven away, priced out of their love, and those that remain will become jaded, and jaded artists create stale art.