Shakespeare for $19. How to save big bucks on London theatre tickets

At Waterloo station, under the Portland stone and bronze Victory Arch, the Roman goddesses flank Britannia, holding her liberty torch aloft. London in July: skies grey, streets flecked with rain. Summer, apparently.

Suddenly, in my mind, I hear the driving electric, bass and acoustic guitars. The hairs on my arms stand up. Terry meets Julie / Waterloo station / Every Friday night. Ray Davies wrote Waterloo Sunset and the Kinks released the single in 1967, the year I was born.

Theatre-lovers are spoilt for choice in London. Credit: Getty Images

Is it possible to feel a past you never experienced? Even on an everyday Monday afternoon in 2024? I was never part of Cool Britannia, a phrase also coined then, for I entered the world via Melbourne, and live in Sydney. But London is eerily familiar in its joyful sorrow: the voyeuristic narrator in Waterloo Sunset is too lazy to leave his room, wondering why dirty old River Thames must keep rolling.

I come to this city for culture, for theatre, for worlds within worlds, within walking distance. I turn amid the grey and see a parked double-decker red bus advertising ABBA Voyage, the Swedish foursome digitally recreated here for an ongoing concert, looking as if the 1970s and disco never died.

I fell in love with ABBA’s bright harmonies, melodic hooks and melancholic undercurrents at age seven. Burgeoning gay boys with something to hide often do. The first time I danced here to the foursome’s digital avatars, in 2022, Mum was still alive, but in a Melbourne nursing home, a necessity borne of cognitive decline and worsening lifelong mental frailty.

Now she is gone. When she was alive, I praised her paintings of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, always copied from clipped photographs, nodding dishonest approval even when she inexplicably added glitter. Mum never made it to London.

I check in to the Stage Door pub in Waterloo, near the Old Vic Theatre. In an expensive city, it is a solid, cheaper option at $140 a night. I share a bathroom with a fellow human. The first time I was here two years ago, a charming London mouse scuttled across the shared kitchen floor.

The stocky innkeeper appears one morning on the floor below, chest bare, towel wrapped around him. “Sorry about the noise last night,” he says, smiling. “England was playing.” Hours earlier, the 2-1 defeat of the Netherlands to reach the Euro 2024 final basted the capital in beer and boorishness.

Going to the theatre in the West End can be expensive, of course. The 10th Doctor Who, David Tennant, who once featured as Shakespeare’s Hamlet on a British postage stamp, recently said tickets can fetch “ludicrous amounts of money”, warning of shutting out younger audiences. Top price West End tickets can fetch up to $570.

The trick here is not to necessarily chase headline stars, to book in advance, to be less fussy in seat choice. Yet at the National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre at Southbank, for a mere $38, I score a middle seat four rows from the stage to experience Simon McBurney’s Mnemonic, an investigation of memory and imagination, of human and ecological chaos, of overlapping stories including the discovery of a 5500-year-old frozen Neolithic man.

Early in the performance, the audience is encouraged to apply black blindfolds and feel a leaf in their hands, imagining the veins as our ancestors, ourselves as the stem. This is the sort of worlds-making theatre I love.

At Trafalgar Theatre, near the watchful eye of Nelson on his column, I see Denise Gough in masterful form as alcoholic and drug-taking actor Emma – or is her real name Sarah? – in denial about her addiction in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things. The $80 seat is set on the rear side of the stage, so close to the actors I almost feel part of their Alcoholics Anonymous circle.

If you love theatre as much as I do, you can be a “groundling”, standing for an outdoor performance of a Shakespeare play at the Globe theatre at Southbank for $19. Michelle Terry takes on the eponymous role in Richard III, skewering the comedy in Richard’s murderous tyranny as the princes are locked in the tower. The whole experience is fabulously immersive, as the actors thread through the crowd onto the stage.

My week ends with ABBA Voyage, in a purpose-built stadium, via the Tube and a short walk. For $150, I am dancing in the mosh pit. Worth every dollar, especially in that continuous melody of Lay All Your Love on Me, Summer Night City, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! and Voulez-Vous, followed by my favourite late ABBA track, When All Is Said and Done, which followed Benny and Frida’s divorce. I can almost touch the past.

I think of that time Mum and I stood and clapped and danced to the Waterloo finale at the Mamma Mia musical in Melbourne. In her final days battling pneumonia last year, I played her the comeback ABBA album, Voyage. The final song, Ode to Freedom, sees ABBA channelling Tchaikovsky: I wish someone would write / An ode to freedom that we all could sing.

In her bed, between her dreams and hallucinations, our connection across space and time was circuitous, never complete.

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