London Theatre is Far From Immune From the Credit Crunch

In a time of financial catastrophe, with sales, jobs and salaries daily heading south, one part of the British marketplace is being hailed as a miracle of slump-busting success. From TV news bulletins to the editorial pages of several newspapers, we hear of a rush of hot-ticket shows in London theatre. A long-serving critic recently wrote that, for the first time in his career, he had needed to be on call seven nights a week to cover all the premieres.

Is there a lesson here for Treasury officials or beleaguered CEOs? They would be wasting their time if they booked to see how playhouses have ­remained booming during a bust. ­Drama's apparent side-stepping of the recession is not quite what it seems: in fact, the true nature of this renaissance is deeply depressing.

All the shows currently being shouted up are worth the cost of ­admission: Jude Law's Hamlet; Simon Russell Beale and Ethan Hawke in Sam Mendes's productions of The Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard; Helen ­Mirren in Phèdre; and Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, which is breaking West End box office records for a straight play. Yet, with the exception of Phèdre, which on Thursday becomes the first National Theater show to be beamed live into UK cinemas, these productions are examples of an ­alarming narrowing of repertoire.

Although it's less than a year since David Tennant portrayed a Danish prince widely described as definitive, Law is already redefining it. And while Mendes points up powerful cross-­echoes by pairing Shakespeare and Chekhov, the works he has chosen to launch his new theatrical venture are fixtures in the Top 40 of classic revivals, as are Ibsen's A Doll's House and ­Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, successively occupying the stage of Michael Grandage's Donmar Warehouse. Further evidence of this bias towards familiar revivals is that the seven-day week cited by that critic as proof of a boom also included new looks at the musical The King and I and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. A scan of approaching opening nights in London reveals another Doll's House and two Medeas.

A preference for recognizable (and therefore reliable) brands is a routine effect of a recession but, this time, the safety-catch has been applied even more tightly. At the moment, there is not a single play in the West End being staged for the first time. Crucially, given that this ­theatrical busyness is ­being billed as resistance to the ­financial crisis, the economics underpinning it are highly ­suspect. Most productions in this red-letter period involve talent – Mirren, Mendes, Hawke, Law, Anderson, ­McKellen, Stewart – working for wages far below their real market rate, their appearances subsidized by the money they have earned in TV and movie work.

In effect, British theatre now has two subsidized sectors: venues underwritten by state taxes (the National, RSC, Royal Court and so on); and theaters that ­benefit from a de facto grants ­system, from big stars taking a holiday from ­Hollywood (Donmar, Old Vic, etc). This second system means that British ­theatre is already operating a version of the controversial scheme at British Airways, in which employees agree to take a pay cut to help out their employers.

Although these stars will be able to return to their lucrative primary careers, the screen industries are continuing to contract in this recession, so the basis of this accidental patronage of theatre is far from sound. And, since the very point of subsidy is that it should permit experimentation, it's depressing that such a tiny syllabus of scripts keeps ­circulating, as if the seasons were being scheduled by a veteran English teacher who likes to stick to what he knows.

Theatrical optimists, carefully ­quoting from the list of forthcoming shows, will probably present a prettier picture. The Young Vic, National, Royal Court and Almeida continue to premiere new work: Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem at the Court is an enticing prospect, and even the ­revival-reliant Donmar has the novelty at Christmas of Red, John ­Logan's play about the ­artist Mark Rothko.

Cultures, though, must be judged on general ­tendencies rather than ­exceptions. This renaissance of British ­theatre is built on oldies that, ­although ­sometimes golden, cannot disguise the fact that ­conservatism is being served to a ­cautious ­audience. A shop that sells the most familiar brands at heavily discounted prices may throng with customers, but true success depends on it finding a market for bold new lines.