Sir, - When is a seat not a seat? When you haven't got enough legroom to sit down.
For years our family has always attended two or three plays during the Dublin Theatre Festival. By and large, although I've often experienced difficulties squeezing into the meagre offerings that some theatres call "seats", we've always enjoyed ourselves immensely. Mind you, by the end of last year's festival, the family admitted that two of us were getting too big for one of Ireland's better-known theatres, so we agreed that we couldn't go there again.
But this year we sat through two plays in a theatre up beyond Dame Street in what I can only describe as "distorted agony". You might wonder, why on earth, after the first tormented experience, did we go back to the same theatre twice? Because we prebooked our tickets to both shows before we knew what we were letting our legs in for.
One of our boys refused to subject himself to the same degree of leg-torture second time round. So, for our second visit, we put his empty seat between myself and my second tallest son to try and alleviate the cramped conditions. It worked somewhat, but only just! Regrettably, by next year, our second and possibly our third son will be too big for this theatre too!
Has anybody in the theatre world noticed that the new generation of children tend to be far bigger than their parents are? These are their customers of the immediate future. But, if they are not careful, more and more of tomorrow's customers will decide that they have "outgrown" theatre.
And that wouldn't be fair to all our wonderful actors and directors. - Yours, etc., Robert Hayes McCoy,
Lea Road,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.