In which the Whingers’ hopes of more allocated seating are cruelly dashed

It was – for a brief moment – as though all the Whingers’ birthdays had come at once (which – when you take into account how many birthdays Phil has had – is quite an astonishing thing).

The posters would have been even wronger than they already are. “The Theatrical Event of the Year” would hot have been Love Never Dies. Nor would it even have been the theatrical event getting the most attention during the period January-June 2010.*

No. Someone told us that they had overheard little bird telling someone else that the Young Vic theatre was planning to introduce allocated seating for its next season. Imagine that! Seats with letters and numbers on them so that you know where you are sitting, you can sit with the friends you have gone to the theatre with and you don’t have to queue in the street.

If it didn’t sound so Richard Littlejohn we would have called it a victory for common sense. The Menier Chocolate Factory is a much more civilised place since it put numbers on its seats and we were hoping that the Domino Theory might be at work and we were looking forward to being able to book at the Young Vic in future without that all-pervasive feeling of dread about the experience of actually going there.

But it seems that the Domino Theory no more applies to allocated seating than it did to Communism. For  Andrew phoned the press office who patiently explained that, “This topic is always on the table.  No change as far as I’m aware.”

So there we are. Back to earth with a bump.

Don’t know why we mentioned it really.

Footnotes

*As Mark Shenton explains:

I recently pointed out here how the ads for Love Never Dies are proudly trumpeting that Benedict Nightingale of The Times has called the show “the theatrical event of the year”, though the phrase was actually nowhere in his two-star review. But yesterday I found it lurking in a preview feature of 2010 Benedict filed back on January 1: “There is no doubting which theatrical event will get the most attention in 2010, or at least in the first half of a year that, like a good play, is yet to reveal all of its secrets. That’s Andrew Lloyd Webber’s follow-up to The Phantom of the Opera….”

So, its not, in fact, so much the theatrical event of the year, as the theatrical event that will get the most attention, a different thing entirely, in 2010, or at least in the first half of the year — a double qualification!