Bad behaviour of theatre audiences has been causing much debate – they drink, fight, consult their mobile phones and are amazingly rude to the staff who try to stop whatever it is they are doing, be it eating popcorn noisily or singing along to the show.
One pleasure in my twilight years is going to the theatre several times a week as I review for a website which means I go without having to pay. But not always. There are a handful of theatres I support and have done for decades to which I buy tickets. I mention this only to stress that I am not one of the elite sitting in the stalls.
Bad audience behaviour is relatively recent and has provoked the Society of London and UK Theatres to suggest there is need for a 'respect' campaign. Theatre audiences in the past did participate noisily – the groundlings in Shakespeare's day, the Victorian gentlemen who went to acquire chorus girls at the musical comedies and the music halls, the Regency blades who sat at the side of the stage – and all interfered.
Maybe it is just that the people misbehaving now are new to theatre today and have come from attending gigs and arena shows where audiences do participate vocally and like to rise to dance in their seats. They have progressed to coming to the glut of musicals in the West End unaware that there is a limit to that group experience of being in a theatre that the director Peter Brook celebrated. Managements do not help as they sell drink and food to be consumed in the auditorium, a source of revenue these days when every little counts, but if they staffed their bars properly, drinks could be consumed beforehand and at the interval. The age of the ancient lady dressed in black bombazine and rouge behind the bar who dished drinks out at top speed have long gone.
Audiences have always responded. Once, years ago, at
The Student Prince starring John Hanson, a very popular leading man, I wondered what the noise was. It turned out to be the audience humming along with the tunes. It summed things up. Their eyes were closed. Hanson sounded great – he couldn't act but he could sing – and so did the songs. They were happy and it was funny not upsetting.
But some kind of etiquette is desirable. Mobile phones should be turned off – at cinema previews they used to confiscate them to avoid piracy by critics – as must taking photographs during the show. Eating and drinking should take place in the bars not the auditorium. Open early. Serve a decent sandwich. Make the money then.
Laugh, boo, cry out loud at what you see. That is part of being an audience. But remember you are not sitting on a sofa in front of the television. What you do there is one thing. In the theatre it should be totally different unless you are attending an immersive production where the action takes place among a largely standing audience. I am not a posh chap denigrating the groundlings – or the boys in the gallery. The fights anyway seem mostly to take place in the stalls. It is not elitism to suggest respect for your neighbours should be part of the theatre experience which Peter Brook was talking about.
Bill Russell
Twenty five years ago, we moved to our first proper home in France. Within a week, our rural charm had been disturbed by an awkward bull of a British expat. He lumbered into our idyll of oak beams, tiled floors and revealed stone with a bluff invitation, almost instruction, to 'pop round for tiffin – three o'clock'.
He lived five minutes away in a classic renovated farmhouse with a charming wife who had prepared an English afternoon tea. On learning that my wife was a working journalist, the bull began a none too subtle effort to encourage her to write about him. She was not keen.
Frankly, we wanted to mingle with French neighbours and dally in their countryside world. One day, as we sought advice on gathering and ripening walnuts (we had nine walnut trees), a farmer neighbour asked if we had chosen our house to be close to a hero. The lumbering bull was Colin Hodgkinson, an ace RAF wartime pilot, who flew with two artificial legs. His autobiography
Best Foot Forward is, at times, a difficult read of a life of excruciating pain and indomitable will to survive and succeed. The poor man's Douglas Bader, as he described himself, had overcome not only amputations but appalling burns. And he lumbered because he refused to use a stick to help him walk.
Now Colin came to mind while watching former Prime Minister Johnson giving evidence to a parliamentary committee last week. As the pitiful spectacle of a third rate human being was exposed, it became embarrassing to remember that this wretch had been the leader of the United Kingdom. While Covid victims died and exhausted doctors and nurses struggled, he and his Downing Street staff had parties. Downing Street was undergoing extreme pressure but, cut it as you will, their reaction was not the stuff of true leadership. And their current attempt to justify their behaviour is appalling. As President Nixon found out, it is the cover up that does the fatal damage.
Colin Hodgkinson had a few goes at being a Member of Parliament in his post-service life. He never succeeded but his political philosophy is revealing. 'The concept of the State, taken to extremes, tends to enfeeble the sense of personal responsibility and leadership... what I have achieved has come through struggle... the stimulating urge for calculated risk is being drained by deadening bureaucracies'.
Okay, you can have your caveats but that sounds like a real leader. Wish he had made it and the disHonourable Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip had not.
David Donald
If you would like to contribute to the Cafe, please email your comments to islay@scottishreview.net
