How to save big money on theater tickets

At Waterloo Station, beneath Portland’s stone and bronze Arch of Victory, Roman goddesses frame Britain, holding high its torch of freedom. London in July: the sky is gray, the streets are streaked with rain. Summer, apparently.

Suddenly, in my mind, I hear the crash of electric, bass and acoustic guitars. The hairs on my arms stand on end. TerRee Meets Julie / Waterloo Station / Every Friday Night. Ray Davies wrote Sunset Waterloo and the Kinks released a single in 1967, the year I was born.

Is it possible to feel a past that you have never experienced? Even on a normal Monday afternoon in 2024? I’ve never been part of Cool Britannia (that phrase also came to mind then) as I entered the world through Melbourne and live in Sydney. But London in its joyful sadness is eerily familiar: a voyeur narrator in Sunset Waterloo too lazy to leave his room and wonders why the dirty old River Thames keeps rolling.

I come to this city for the culture, for the theater, for the worlds within worlds, within walking distance. I turn around in the grayness and see a parked double-decker red bus with an advertisement. ABBA VoyageThe Swedish four-piece, recreated here digitally for an ongoing concert, looks as if the 1970s and disco never died.

I fell in love with ABBA’s vibrant harmonies, melodic hooks and melancholic undertones at age seven. Growing up gay boys with something to hide often do this. When I first danced here to digital avatars of the foursome in 2022, Mum was still alive but in a nursing home in Melbourne, a necessity brought on by lifelong cognitive decline and worsening mental frailty.

Now she’s gone. When she was alive, I complimented her paintings of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, always copied from photographic clippings, nodding dishonestly in approval even when she inexplicably added glitter. Mom never made it to London.

I check into the Stage Door pub in Waterloo, near the Old Vic Theatre. In an expensive city, this is a reliable and cheap option at $140 per night. I share a bathroom with another person. When I first visited here two years ago, there was an adorable London mouse scurrying across the floor of the communal kitchen.

A stocky innkeeper appears one morning on the floor below, bare-chested and wrapped in a towel. “Sorry about the noise last night,” he says, smiling. “England was playing.” Hours earlier, the Netherlands’ 2-1 defeat in the Euro 2024 final had filled the capital with beer and rudeness.

Of course, going to the theater in the West End can be expensive. The tenth Doctor Who, David Tennant, who once portrayed Shakespeare’s Hamlet on a British postage stamp, recently said tickets could fetch “ridiculous amounts of money”, warning it would fail to attract younger audiences. Top-priced West End tickets can cost up to $570.