<\/p>\n
From Ncuti Gatwa in Born With Teeth to Alicia Vikander<\/a> in The Lady From the Sea and Susan Sarandon in Mary Page Marlowe, there is no shortage of starry celebrities being cast for the West End right now.<\/p>\n It is a phenomenon happening in subsidised theatre too: Indhu Rubasingham\u2019s inaugural season at the National Theatre features the likes of screen favourites Paul Mescal and Nicola Coughlan<\/a>.<\/p>\n But over the last few years, the propensity to cast film and TV stars for the stage has become a point of contention in an industry still struggling from funding cuts and changing audience habits after the Covid pandemic. While some believe big names can help entice audiences and sell tickets, others say they stop risk-averse theatres from taking a chance on smaller productions with unknown casts.<\/p>\n It was a debate freshly renewed this week when Nadine Rennie, a co-chair of the Casting Directors\u2019 Guild, warned the trend was \u201ckilling\u201d the industry<\/a>, and mid-scale theatres would be the first to go \u2013 despite being where the household names of the future cut their teeth.<\/p>\n Speaking at conference hosted by Spotlight at Rada, Rennie compared the proliferation of celebrity names on stages to \u201cfeeding a child too much sugar\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s killing audiences\u2019 intellects. I hear audience members say all the time: \u2018I don\u2019t know anybody who\u2019s in this.\u2019 Or they\u2019re not excited about a new play by an emerging writer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Jill Green, a casting director for shows including The Devil Wears Prada, The Great Gatsby and War Horse, said many casting directors were increasingly being asked to cast big-name actors, with some theatres refusing to commit to booking a show until a recognised name was attached.<\/p>\n \u201cThis does make it much harder for new writing and productions without headline names to secure a slot against star-led shows,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, the real question is: what actually constitutes a \u2018big name\u2019 who can sell that many tickets? The pool of talent that genuinely moves the needle at the box office isn\u2019t exactly Olympic-sized.\u201d<\/p>\n Her sentiments echoed those of the National Theatre\u2019s director of casting, Alastair Coomer, who told the Spotlight conference that celebrity casting was \u201cthe biggest driver now\u201d for audiences, putting immense pressure on the industry. \u201cAll of us are chasing the same very, very small group of people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But having a star on the bill is not without its benefit. Green said the theatre provided a \u201cfantastic opportunity\u201d for audiences to see a performer they admire taking on a role that truly suits their skill set. \u201cIt can also help fill houses, which in turn sustains a lot of jobs both on and off stage,\u201d she added. \u201cBut ticket pricing has become a major concern \u2013 if prices rise to extortionate levels, we risk excluding audiences who simply can\u2019t afford to go.\u201d<\/p>\n This is becoming apparent in the US, where the swing towards star casting is particularly dramatic<\/a>. Tickets for George Clooney\u2019s Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck went for upwards of $800 (\u00a3600), while those for Denzel Washington\u2019s Othello went for up to $1,000.<\/p>\n \u201cWould I celebrate a world where my theatre was packed, but each ticket was \u00a3300, which is what\u2019s happening on Broadway?\u201d Nadia Fall, the artistic director of the Young Vic theatre, told the Guardian recently<\/a>. \u201cThis is where the maths could lead us: theatre as a pastime for the elite.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway earlier this year.<\/span> Photograph: Andy Kropa\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n The theatre critic Arifa Akbar says there is a certain \u201ccircus\u201d element to A-lister castings. \u201cMany people come to see the star rather than the play. It\u2019s a way of bringing in money and getting bums on seats, for sure, but it\u2019s not a financial \u2013 or creative \u2013 solution for the industry in the long run because the demographic buying tickets for star-led shows won\u2019t come when there\u2019s no star in sight,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s also eclipsing the nurturing of dedicated theatre talent, which is not born off the back of a Netflix series. And shows can still go seriously wrong, however A-list the actor, as we saw in Sigourney Weaver\u2019s weird, wooden turn in the West End\u2019s The Tempest last year.\u201d<\/p>\n Kenny Wax, the producer of plays and musicals including Six the Musical, The Play That Goes Wrong and Why Am I So Single?, emphasised that seeing shows with big stars were rare \u2013 and sometimes transformative \u2013 experiences.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cWhen Tom Holland was cast in Romeo and Juliet it was an opportunity to get young people into Shakespeare who would have never gone to see that play otherwise. Kenneth Branagh is returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in over 30 years next year; that\u2019s really exciting for youngsters to have a chance to see him live on stage.\u201d<\/p>\n Wax said there were \u201cplenty of theatres and plenty of productions throughout the year to go around\u201d. \u201cThis summer we had The Comedy About Spies at the No\u00ebl Coward, which had no big TV or film stars, but literally sold out 100% for 20 weeks. You don\u2019t need a star. The quality and the cream always tends to rise to the top.\u201d<\/p>\n For Wax, London<\/a> continues to strike a good balance between new work, risks and big stars \u2013 especially compared with New York, where \u201cyou can\u2019t do it without the big stars\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe American system is considered quite broken at the moment. It\u2019s incredibly expensive to put on a play or a musical in New York. The Play That Goes Wrong cost about \u00a3250,000 in London, but when it opened in New York eight years ago it cost $4m. With the same set. The climate has only got more difficult. Since Covid, 46 musicals have opened on Broadway, and only three of them have been profitable<\/a> \u2013 including our show Six.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From Ncuti Gatwa in Born With Teeth to Alicia Vikander in The Lady From the Sea and Susan Sarandon in Mary Page Marlowe, there is no shortage of starry celebrities being cast for the West End right now. It is a phenomenon happening in subsidised theatre too: Indhu Rubasingham\u2019s inaugural season at the National Theatre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2112890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2112889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Whats-in-a-name-West-End-casting-directors-raise-concerns.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2112889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2112891,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112889\/revisions\/2112891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2112890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2112889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2112889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2112889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}