Sex Sells Theatre Tickets

An article in the Daily Telegraph explains in fascinating detail how David Pugh and his partner Daffyd Rogers financed Equus and their many other theatrical successes and occasional failures. However it says little about the part David’s marketing skill has played in his achievements. I have met no other producer who combines theatrical knowledge with marketing flair in quite the way David does.


David’s decision to change the cast of Art every twelve weeks was a clever way of keeping the show in the news, as was the special celebrity guest each night in The Play What I Wrote. When he brought Rebecca starring Nigel Havers to my then theatre, he marketed it with a brilliant black and white photo (by Lord Lichfield) of Havers looking wistful on a beach. David gave me a framed version of the poster when we broke the British box office record for a play. It’s the only theatre poster I have in my office.



The image used for Equus was just as striking, featuring a bare chested Daniel Radcliffe whose lower body morphed into a horse’s head. The announcement of the West End run was accompanied by studio photos of a nearly naked Daniel. They were entirely in keeping with the sexual themes in the play but the image of a sexy Harry Potter gained coverage in virtually every national paper.

Comment Is Free

Much relief in the world of theatre critics that the Appeal Court has not allowed the composer of the opera Manifest Destiny to sue critic Veronica Lee for her comments in the Evening Standard. Her review had suggested that the work was anti-American and made terrorists seem heroic. The court decided this was 'fair comment'.

It is always a worry for the media that a review might step over the line into libel. I had the same concern myself when publishing audience reviews on a website . A successful libel suit would have severely restricted all of us from giving our opinions in public.

It is right that people should not be free to make damaging remarks about a product or person out of malice or by implying an opinion to be a fact. However giving an opinion reasonably formed from an experience is fundamental to our freedom of speech.

See Veronica's response to the verdict on the Observer website.

Harry Triumphs- in PR at least

I guess like half the world's population, I've spent the last few days reading Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. I know it's ultimately just another PR event- just like the book is just another adventure story but the plot is clever and the action gripping and so was the PR.
It's sometimes hard to believe anyone was paid to market the book since there was already such global interest but the way the build-up was handled with little leaks and PR events was brilliant. It was great to get to the final battle and to find out the fate of all our favourite characters (and whether the publishers could prevent the outcome being revealed).
There's a bit too much exposition (a bit like when Poirot explains whodunit) and occasionally I got fed up with the 'with a bound they were free' solutions to the fixes our heroes were in (in the manner of the old Saturday morning kids' films) but these are minor quibbles.
Well done, JK and your PR people, you brought everything to a very satisfactory conclusion. Not sure whether the epilogue (19 years later) was really in keeping- but perhaps this was the bit that she famously wrote all those years ago, so she couldn't really abandon it now. Time to get on with the rest of our lives.