An odd thing happened at the National Theatre last week. It was the opening
night of Racine’s tragedy Phédre and Helen Mirren, as the
title character, was giving a powerful performance. She spoke (and I quote)
of terror, delirium, the agonies of craving, the horror of guilt, impossible
pain, bottomless degradation, self-loathing, despair and, worst, the
discovery that the stepson she incestuously adored was in love with another.
And what was the impact on a section of the audience? It came out with what
sounded like canned laughter from a dopey sitcom.
I blinked. My wife looked at me in disbelief. Somehow Mirren kept her
emotional focus, but she must have wondered what she had to do to be really
funny. Disembowel herself, perhaps. There are punters who would roll in the
aisles when King Lear carried in the dead Cordelia.
Imagine that you were the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado and had a
little list for people who wouldn’t be missed. Mine, like his, would include
people with “irritating laughs”. But the theatre offers plenty of other
candidates. Chatterers who think that they’re watching telly at home. Mobile
phone pests. Fidgety schoolchildren. Late arrivals who unapologetically
shove past, squashing your toes. People who think that taking the paper off
their sweets very slowly makes less noise. Couples who fondle in the stalls
and, occasionally, have sex in the boxes.
Also, a sound we can expect to hear a lot this autumn, especially if the flu
pandemic has a bronchial aftermath. Harold Pinter once said that coughing
was “an act of aggression”. John Barrymore famously brought a huge fish on
stage and threw it at the coughers shouting “you damned walruses, eat this
while we go on with the play”. Sometimes you can’t help coughing, but those
who don’t try to suppress it are on that little list.
Is the behaviour of theatre audiences worsening? A writer in The Wall
Street Journal recently claimed it was doing so in New York, citing the
cases of Patti LuPone, who broke character to scream at a man videoing her
in Gypsy, and the actress Tovah Feldshuh, who was told by a latecomer
to restart her monologue about the Holocaust when he’d sat down and,
amazingly, she obeyed him. In Britain, we certainly have comparable evidence
to offer. The bloggers had a go at Su Pollard the other day after she went
to see Much Ado About Nothing in the Open Air Theatre and spent much
of the play chatting to friends and, when the mood took her, shouting
“gorgeous!” and “fabulous!” at the cast. Recently there was a 15-minute
standoff at the Duke of Yorks when Ken Stott refused to continue playing the
lead in Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge until a teacher
removed talkative children, which she did to cries of “out, out” from the
rest of the audience. And Richard Griffiths has reacted to interruptions by
mobile phones to both The History Boys and Heroes by demanding
that their owners leave the theatre, in the first case adding “and never,
ever come back again”.
Recently there were also unconfirmed reports of a noisy climax in a West End
theatre that wasn’t happening onstage. Certainly, Simon Callow remembers
being naked but for goggles and chains in a play called The Beastly
Beatitudes of Balthazar B, “to find myself thoroughly upstaged by a
couple making loud and passionate love in a stage box”. And Richard Eyre,
then National supremo, was told by a flummoxed company manager that a couple
were having sex in the Lyttelton circle. “I advised him to let them get on
with it, as disturbing their flow, so to speak, might be more disruptive,”
he says.
Disruption can clearly take many forms and those forms can change with time.
When did you last hear actors booed or see them hit by projectiles? On my
last visit to the Almeida a couple were soaked by a glass of water falling
from the balcony and upset when no apology followed. Well, they were luckier
than Shaw, who was hit by flying sausages and intimated that he would have
preferred a cabbage, since he was a vegetarian. The case of Waiting for
Godot is instructive. When it hit London in 1954 there was persistent
heckling, one man yelling “don’t you realise that you’ve been hoaxed?” and
trouble averted only when an actor remarked “I think it’s Godot”. But Ian
McKellen, who appears with Callow in the revival of Beckett’s play, says
that audiences at the Haymarket have been exemplary.
McKellen remembers seeing John Gielgud’s King Lear as a young man
and, enraged by a woman who was giggling at the mad scene, biffing her on
the head with his programme. But he’s more tolerant now. “Your audiences are
your masters and are paying the bills,” he says. “Yes, they sometimes rustle
programmes or eat sweets or even send texts, but mostly they’re well behaved
and attentive. After all, that’s how they get the most out of the evening.”
And he points out that some nuisances, such as the sound of scores of
smokers lighting up at moments they found slack, are history.
Indeed, a breeze through history tells you how chaotic theatre performances
have been and can be. I suspect that even the first night of Oedipus
wasn’t so placid, since it was part of the Festival of Dionysus, and
Dionysus meant drunkenness. Roman theatres were often turbulent, with Ovid
calling audiences “adulterers, whoremasters, panders, whores and suchlike
effeminate, idle, unchaste, lascivious, graceless persons”. And the
Elizabethan puritans, like the early Christians, saw the theatre as “Satan’s
banquet”, one Stephen Gosson enveighing against “such heaving and shoving,
such itching and shouldering to sit by women, such giving them pippins, such
playing at cards, such toying, such smiling, such winking and such manning
them home when the sports are ended”.
For decades after the Restoration theatres were places were you might pick up
prostitutes, see fights with swords drawn, even join in the odd riot.
Foreign visitors were regularly appalled by the pandemonium at London
playhouses. One German was pelted with orange peel, “which robbed me of all
curiosity”; another so doused with water “my hat was saturated”; others saw
mugs and bottles rain down and, in 1755, “a hard piece of cheese greatly
hurt a young lady in the pit”. Even Boswell and his friends went to Drury
Lane “with oaken cudgels in our hands and shrill-sounding catcalls in our
pockets” and hissed and whistled a tragedy called Elvira to
oblivion.
The rise of the respectable middle classes in the 19th century banished the
rakes from the theatre and the lowpaid to the balcony, though up there they
still liked to make themselves heard and felt. Noël Coward’s Sirocco
was violently barracked in 1921, one actress responding to a yell of “give
the old cow a chance” with “thank you, sir, you’re the only gentleman here”.
After his World of Paul Slickey had received a similar bashing in
1959, John Osborne was chased up the Charing Cross Road by enraged
theatregoers. But since Joe Orton’s scabrous What the Butler Saw
in 1969, when the gallery yelled “give back your knighthood” at Ralph
Richardson, audiences have gone soft.
A pity in some ways? Well, barracking did and does imply involvement, caring.
Yet Mark Rylance, the first director of Shakespeare’s replica Globe,
admitted that he went too far by inviting audiences to hiss, throw peel and
reinvent themselves as Elizabethan groundlings. Things became
self-conscious, silly, and, with spectators cheering Shylock’s conversion to
Christianity and Henry V’s order to kill his French prisoners, even
obnoxious.
Though the space still encourages audience interaction — Hamlet and a
groundling nodded gravely at each other when Hamlet asks “Am I a coward?” — there’s
now more watching and listening at the Globe.
Yet history tells us that trouble will sometimes erupt. A few days ago the
same mobile phone went off five times during a performance of Bruno
Beltrão at Sadler’s Wells. People have been heard answering calls,
in one case with “I’m in the theatre — no, not very”. An eminent BBC man was
spotting using his BlackBerry during the premiere of the current revival of Oliver!
Further back, Kevin Spacey interjected “tell them I’m not here” when a call
interrupted a speech in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.
Simon Callow got a round of applause when a phone went off at the start of
his one-man Dickens show and, coincidentally, his first line was “Dickens
here”.
Farther back still, Nicol Williamson found his Macbeth wasn’t just “supping
full with horrors” but was supping too full with little horrors, and stopped
a Stratford matinée to tell them that he could be earning zillions in
Hollywood but was doing a great play for peanuts, so they could damned well
shut up: which they did. Farther back yet, Michael Redgrave objected when a
woman in the front row plugged a hairdryer into a footlight during the John
of Gaunt speech in Richard II, to be told by her husband that “it’s
OK, she always does this”.
But be careful. Not all audience interruptions are silly or malign. I’ve seen
people fall ill during performances and be taken out. Ian McKellen had a
woman die during Durrenmatt’s The Visit, which, he wryly says,
“meant she missed the end of the play”.
He also recounts a tale of Alec Guinness, who was so irked by the woman who
was watching him through enormous binoculars from the front row that he
stepped down and removed them. An usher appeared in the interval to say:
“The blind woman in the front row apologises if she has upset you.” A moral
somewhere there?
