A Great Night Out: The Making of the West End Theatre Museum, London WC2, until October 2004
In 1973, the cast of Oh! Calcutta! staged a naked protest against the proposed demolition of five theatres around Covent Garden. The campaign led to a more positive view on protecting historic buildings.
But the survival of London's West End has always been a triumph of will. Over the past 160 years, it has seen off bombs, developers, competition from cinema and TV and ever-increasing overheads. According to A Great Night Out: The Making of the West End 1843-2010, the West End has always been in a state of flux. Beneath the glitz, there has always existed a 'twilight' world of poverty, crime, vice and drugs. Victorian journalists were scandalised by the immorality of the area, while police monitored political extremists who frequented the anarchist clubs of Soho.
Today, the West End has 40 theatres within a two-mile radius. How did London end up with the largest concentration of performing arts venues in the world, rivalled only by Broadway in New York? In fact, it came about through a powerful combination of forces. From 1841 to 1891, the population of inner London doubled to four million, creating a vast potential audience. Railways and the new Underground offered quick transportation to the West End.
Meanwhile, a 'clean up' of the area was demanded by social reformers keen to expose the pornography trade along the Strand and the notorious red light area through the Aldwych.
The easiest way to be rid of the slums was to build three new roads, which created sites for new theatres. Between 1875-1914, 40 theatres and music halls were built, providing elegant venues to stage the fashionable plays of Wilde, Pinero et al.
Entering the exhibition is like walking on to an expressionist stage set, as a brick facade dissolves to reveal the plush and velvet of a Victorian theatre. An audio loop plays taxi horns, applause and popular music, while sacks of abandoned rubbish remind us of pressing social issues. In the main gallery, cupboard doors open to reveal the secret histories of the 40 theatres (a bit like a giant advent calendar).
Archive photographs show how the densely packed theatre buildings presented an easy target for Nazi bombers. The fact that only eight major venues were lost is a tribute to the thousands of vigilant fire watchers
After the war, the principles of the welfare state were being thrashed out. For the first time, there was concerted pressure for state funding of the arts to allow everyone to benefit, leading to the formation of the National and the RSC. But as property values soared, speculators acquired many theatre sites for redevelopment, hence the colourful protests documented by the exhibition, including a touching 1957 photo of a fragile Vivien Leigh protesting against the destruction of St James's Theatre.
In the mid-1990s, we had the crown jewels of lottery funding, represented here by architectural models of the revamped Royal Court, Sadler's Wells and new Stirling Prize winner, the Laban Centre.
There's no denying A Great Night Out has a subtle political agenda. The West End may have been a guaranteed way to make money in Oscar Wilde's day (a ledger from The Importance of Being Earnest shows that he made the equivalent of £400,000 a year, enough to run a Mayfair house and 10 servants). But it is one of the paradoxes of modern theatre that today's commercial producers make far less profit.
As a result, they have had little surplus to invest in infrastructure (more than 33 are now listed buildings). At Tuesday's opening party for A Great Night Out, The Theatre Trust made a point of presenting Arts Minister Estelle Morris with a copy of their new report, 'Act Now!', which insists that £250 million is needed over the next decade to maintain the commercial theatre sector in line with rising international standards.
Clearly, reconciling the different interests in the debate is not easy - and the exhibition concludes with a montage of interviews with theatre owners, tourists, local restaurateurs, representatives from homelessness charities, you name it. Best of all is theatre critic Michael Billington berating the West End for 'too many stale formulae, too many arthritic musicals'.
But you can't stay cynical for long; there's something very magical about this show. Let's not forget that when Cameron Mackintosh's Stephen Sondheim theatre opens in 2007, ingeniously created by building on to the roof of the existing Queen's and Gielgud theatres, it will be the first entirely new theatre in the West End for more than 70 years.