Lacking in Laughs and Access: The Disneyfication of the West End

If the old oxymoron about Britain and America being divided by a common language is true, then it can also be said that our culture is coming between us. Specifically, our sense of humour.

Quite what a chasm it has become was brought home to me when I had to sit through two-and-a-half hours of Hercules at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, London.

It replaces Frozen at the venue which opened in 2021 and, once again, it’s a show that’s already been established by Disney as a strong money-spinning brand – it, too, was first a big hit on celluloid – and its executives across the Atlantic have thrown so much money at promoting the stage version that it looks like it’s too big to fail.

Whether it deserves not to fail is another matter, however, and, unlike Frozen, which was directed by a British director in Michael Grandage – I’d say our very best – this one has an American at the helm in Casey Nicholaw.

Grandage understood something about his fellow countrymen and women: they may well have a weak spot for big budget spectaculars, but they also want at least a veneer of wit and sophistication. Above all things, they want the jokes to be funny. They don’t like to have their intelligence totally insulted.

Regrettably, the American has ensured Hercules possesses not a single intellectual muscle – let alone a funny bone – and the boring, if garish and ostentatious, show that he has come up with has inevitably been panned by the critics as pre-packaged and homogenised theatrical Muzak.

I wondered during Hercules how it was possible for its writers Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah to have scripted a show that lasts as long as this one without even once managing to raise a grudging smile or even a limp concession that something mildly interesting had just been uttered.

Among London producers I’ve heard anxious talk about the “Disneyfication” of the West End and, perhaps, in a time of globalisation, there is a grim inevitability to this happening. 

Hercules is certainly a world away from the ideals of Laurence Olivier who used to say that theatre should “glamorise intellect” and help to humanise the punters and expand their emotional literacy. Generations of artistic susceptibilities certainly separate this musical from, say, My Fair Lady or Oklahoma! and it seems almost sacrilegious to mention them in the same sentence.

Disney’s London theatre subsidiary might reasonably be said to be in the business of glamorising only inanity, and, so far from humanising theatregoers, it can reasonably be said to be zombifying them.

This opens up a wider point about how culture all over the world is now being dominated by fewer and fewer players and none of them, it would appear, are greatly appreciative of a good joke. Even British television, which used to be a lot more open to new talent and platforming often quirky but challenging performers, is these days dominated – so far as the BBC, the independent channels, and the streaming services are concerned – by just a small handful of omnipotent executives and favoured agents. This  accounts for why we see the same ageing, unchallenging, and all-too-familiar faces on our screens night after night.

If all you ever watched was mainstream theatre or television, it would be easy enough to conclude that there is a generation coming up that has no discernible talent or any obvious sense of humour – but the opposite is actually the case. 

The kind of snobby comics the Cambridge Footlights used to produce on a seemingly endless production line may now have petered out – Stephen Fry might be said to have delighted us quite enough – but there are rich seams of laughter to be mined elsewhere.

In recent weeks, I have been touring the capital’s comedy circuit and can genuinely say I’ve not laughed so much in years. Names now revered by those who frequent these venues – I would say Arie David, Ridwan Hussain, and Oliver Moore are among the very best – are the modern-day successors to the likes of Pamela Stevenson, Rowan Atkinson, and Mel Smith. But they are none of them being allowed to achieve their potential in the way that they should.

Miss David’s humour in particular is clever and biting: I liked the story she told of how, during the lockdowns, she and her neighbours would gather each night to clap a local NHS nurse as she returned home, applauding her for all the lives they believed she had been saving, only to find out – when it was all over – that she worked at the local abortion clinic.

It’s all in Miss David’s deadpan delivery, of course, but she and her fellow comics have got something I don’t see in mainstream performers these days. Maybe it’s just that they are hungry. I just say give them their chance. 

The whole entertainment industry now seems too top-down, corporate, and inaccessible to allow for a great many breakthroughs and, by extension, a great many laughs. As in so many spheres of activity, the entertainment industry – if it’s to truly entertain us once more – needs as a matter of urgency to decolonise.

Tim Walker is a playwright and journalist. He writes the ‘Mandrake’ column for the monthly Byline Times print edition. He was formerly a political commentator for The New European (now The New World) and the Telegraph