A decade ago, Louis Benjamin, then the head of Stoll Moss, London’s largest theatre owners, showed me the graphs for West End ticket sales and pointed out the clutched straws with which each dip in receipts was rationalized: “Libyan crisis,” “Royal wedding,” “Weather v. bad,” “Weather v. good.” “We’ve got an awful lot of excuses,” he said.  

But it’s all rubbish. It’s like the old excuse when takings were down at the Finsbury Empire [a raucous music hall]: “Polo at Hurlingham.” I took 300,000 pounds at the Palladium last week. D’you think I care what the bloody weather was like?

This was 1991, Gulf War time, when Saddam Hussein, despite being preoccupied with brutalizing Kuwait and fending off the Great Satan, had apparently found time to close two West End musicals, Children of Eden and Matador. I’m all for blaming Sad ...

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