Could the NT’s legendary £10 Travelex season happen today?

Could a sufficiently bold artistic director do something of the like again? Perhaps even Indhu Rubasingham as she begins her tenure at the NT? It feels heartbreaking if we simply say ‘no’, but it’s a complicated question and one that should probably start with a discussion of what the purpose of the Travelex season was.

The Olivier is a notoriously awkward space to programme and Hytner had inherited a building from Trevor Nunn in which the biggest theatre simply wasn’t getting anything like full unless it was hosting a musical.

While sponsorship from Travelex and a greatly reduced design budget played their part, Hytner principally gambled that by dropping prices he could boost capacity and make up the difference that way. Crucially, he’d also programmed some really good stuff: the Adrian Lester-starring Henry V and Olivier-nominated production of David Mamet’s Edmond featuring Kenneth Branagh were probably the season’s most notable entries (with Branagh signing on precisely because he liked the idea of the season).

The season was a success. When I mentioned it on Twitter/X recently, it prompted a lot of fond reminiscence from people who’d found it literally life-changing, in that they’d become lifetime theatregoers after seeing it. More to the point, the stats don’t lie: Hytner got his bump in attendance, with even the poorly reviewed Tales from the Vienna Woods playing to 75% capacity, while Edmond was at a walloping 98%. Of the first 100,000 £10 tickets sold, 20,000 were to first-time NT ticket buyers, with half of those returning within the next 18 months. 

So why not do it again? In an age when it’s not uncommon for actors in plays to slag off the prices of their own show, why not do another £10 season?

Well, first things first, £10 in 2003 is £17.73 now; £25 is a shade under £45. It wasn’t quite as cheap as it now sounds.

Secondly, it was designed to address audience numbers, and it did that. Pre-Hytner, the average Olivier attendance was 60% to 70%. Now, it stands closer to between 80% and 90%.

Third, the season does have a legacy: subsidised Travelex seats remained part of the NT’s offering for a long time and there are a multitude of access schemes at the theatre now that didn’t exist pre-Hytner.

Ultimately, it is surely the case that if a hypothetical right sponsor was prepared to write a blank-ish check, the right names were prepared to take a pay cut for a good cause and the right savings were to be made elsewhere, then yes, it hardly seems unimaginable that at the very least a £20/£45 season could happen. 

‘A lot of people told me the Travelex season got them into theatre – they took a punt on it and were hooked’

But you wouldn’t be doing it for strategic reasons, as Hytner was. It would be to make some sort of dramatic temporary gesture against the cost-of-living crisis and generally spiralling cost of theatre tickets. 

So the question really is: is there any point in doing a cheap season in 2024? People unable to afford to go to the theatre as much as they’d like is not something you can just end with a splashy one-off season.

Isn’t that all a bit dispiriting though? Shouldn’t theatre be about theatrical gestures? A lot of people have told me that the Travelex season is what got them into art in the first place; that they took a punt on it and were hooked. The sense of event around the season as a whole and the prospect of seeing big names and low prices created a sort of critical mass or excitement that’s unbelievably rare in theatre beyond hypey one-off shows. 

I’m not saying, as a big-mouthed journalist, that it’s imperative to the British theatre industry to meet my personal demands on this. But I am saying that I’m not sure it’s fully acknowledged what a landmark event the Travelex season was, and how sad it would be to shrug and say: ‘Don’t be silly, it’s impossible to repeat, times have changed.’ Maybe it’s a pipe dream, but I’ll never stop hoping we see its like again.