Are restricted view seats worth the risk?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the disadvantages of regional theatre is that you have to plan quite far in advance to be sure of getting tickets for some of the more popular productions. I discovered this to my cost when I failed to realise until about six weeks ago that the Donmar production of King Lear was heading to Glasgow's Theatre Royal last week.

By this point, the only tickets left were restricted view. I had a quick read of the descriptions of each of these seats - most of them were along the lines of 'pillar in front of seat obscures half of stage'. I eventually found one that didn't sound too bad. Apparently Q11 has a 'pillar two rows in front at edge of field of vision'. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but to me that suggests that I will probably be able to see this pillar out of the corner of my eye and it might require me to squint round it to see the edge of the stage....

Sadly, seat Q11 has a pillar directly in front of it, obscuring part of the stage about a third of the way in from house right. So not quite on the edge of my field of vision, but right in the blimmin' middle of it!

So it was with some trepidation that I sat down and waited for the action to start. To my surprise, the pillar wasn't as much of an issue as I feared it might be. Obviously, this being Shakespeare the majority of the 'action' was people standing around talking (and doing it very well I might add). It also turned out that the area of stage that was obscured was roughly the width of a Jacobi*, so even when characters were doing more than just pontificating I didn't miss much.

The only real drawback was that my tired eyes struggled slightly with the effort involved in focussing on the stage rather than the pillar, and by the end I was physically exhausted - as well as emotionally drained by the brilliance of the subject matter and performances I had just witnessed.

For this performance then, the restricted view seat was definitely worth it - £24 to see a production of this calibre seems like a real bargain. However, I think this is probably down to the nature of the play itself - this seat would have been a real issue for a performance that was a little more action packed, even at a considerably reduced price. As such I really feel that Ambassador Theatres need to amend the description of this seat on their website. I would certainly hesitate before booking a restricted view in future, even though it worked in my favour on this occasion.

*official measurement.