This building has 412 seats. Seventy-five of them cannot see the top of the upstage wall, because the gallery is in the way.
What most theatres do
Most theatres describe those seats as “restricted view”, discount them a little, and leave the buyer to find out on the night what was restricted. It is not dishonest exactly. It is just useless, because “restricted” covers everything from a handrail in the corner of your eye to missing a third of the set.
What we do instead
The section drawing of this house exists. It has always existed — it is how the building was built. Running a sightline from a seat, over the gallery’s leading edge, to the upstage wall is a calculation an A-level student could do, and the answer is a number in metres.
So the seating plan on this site gives you that number. Row M, centre: the gallery takes 3.0 m off the top of the wall. For Vanya, where nothing goes above head height, that costs you precisely nothing. For The Weir Keeper, where the design is the wall, it costs you the top third of the dam, and the plan says so on that production’s page and not on the others.
The part we did not expect to have to publish
Doing the arithmetic properly turned up something we had not put together before. For a tall set, the cheapest seats in the gallery see more of it than the dearest seats in the rear stalls. We could have quietly not mentioned that. It is on the front page.