by They are at it again. Actors crying over rotten audiences. In an interview this week, Line of Duty star Adrian Dunbar – who will be making his musical theater debut as Fred Graham in a new production of Kiss Me, Kate at the Barbican – grumbled about the behavior of theatergoers, saying “over a be cheerful” they are met in an audience with “one or two people whose faces are lit up” by their phones.
This was the same week that Cush Jumbo, which is currently on stage at the tiny Donmar Warehouse and Lady Macbeth opposite David Tennant as the bloody thane, showed that the audience tended to his show, which requires the viewing headphones to wear around the world. rip off their sweet covers and get away with the assumption that no one can hear. The actors can. Be warned.
“It’s a strange modern phenomenon,” Dunbar said. “Sometimes it’s people who haven’t been to the theater before who don’t get it. They don’t know about the fourth wall. They may think that they are watching TV and that they can get away with what is happening. Although theater is a very active and communal experience.”
Apart from the last sentence, I do not agree with this assessment. I don’t think people who have never been to the theater go in unaware that there are real people pretending to be in front of them. I don’t think first-time theatergoers are to blame, especially in straight plays. If their demeanor is at all different it’s usually even more polite, resulting in a bit of uncertainty.
But I think he’s underestimating the bad behavior, the rustlers, the cheaters, the chatters, the scrollers. They are not idiots, they know how it works. They are just entitled, selfish and rude.
Let me be clear about this. I have no desire to police the audience’s reactions to the work being performed before them. One of the happiest theater experiences of my life was a mixed program at Watford Palace, where a whole year group of teenagers were in attendance. Their unfiltered responses to the stories unfolding on stage, from vocal outrage to shock jumpscare, made my evening endless.
Yes, sometimes it can break the tension, and it can slide into self-indulgence. Look at me! I’M SO INTRODUCTORY. But most of the time, it’s at least one sign of a successful evening at the theater that an audience feels safe and free to respond in an authentic way to something dramatic.
Contrast this with my visit to the Enfield Haunting last week. We will draw a veil over the drama itself, which was bad. But what made it infinitely worse was the couple in the row behind me who offered running commentary for the action, delivered in stage fright, and the two a few seats down who seemed to be they are eating a three-course meal out of a cellophane bag. All over.
Every moment of silence, meant to build up the tension in this pseudo-supernatural mystery drama, was interrupted by the sharp crack of a huge packet of crisps (someone else had juiced them, but it made no difference). The show was 70 minutes. You can wait for your goddamn dinner.
It’s a small thing but a dramatic silence grew on me, I felt suicidal. Then imagine what it’s like for theater managers, who have to put up with worse, night after night. A conversation my colleague had with a theater manager in the West End, supported elsewhere, made our hair stand on end – people bawling out front of house staff for the slightest reason, people picking upstairs, people having sex in the toilets, apparently not. happen very often (considering it’s hard enough to sit down in the tiny West End theater toilets, this almost knocked me over. It’s good to be a little bit in the ground floor loo of the Wyndham’s a trying to pee in a Cubist painting; the bendy athleticism required They must have sex Olympic-standard).
What is wrong with people? Maybe it has to do with the cost. Theater tickets are, for the most part, expensive as hell. Perhaps there is the feeling that, having spent up to, say, 180 quid on a pair of tickets for something, not to mention station parking, the train, dinner, the babysitter and so on, that they are entitled to five stars, anything goes with the experience from the moment they arrive to the second they lay down on the pillow.
I have some sympathy with the urge to get your money’s worth, but no one attends the theater alone, that’s the point. As Dunbar says, it is a collective experience. We all contribute, for better and for worse, and anyone with common sense should tell anyone with common sense to shut up, turn off their phone, the crunchy stuff put away, and listen to it, out of respect for the actors. and the work on stage, and for the people who also paid their hard-earned money to watch it. And for you – why pay that much just to sit in a dark room snacking on overpriced snacks and bad wine, looking at your phone? Are you out of your mind?
For a few hours, your manager cannot contact you. You have the perfect excuse not to go for a run, pick up anyone’s socks, or do the laundry. You are allowed to immerse yourself in another world with a group of like-minded strangers. In today’s ultra-connected, ultra-disconnected society, why not grab that opportunity with both hands?
Something the Culture Editor did this week
Cowbois, Royal Court
Charlie Josephine’s very funny queer Western is funny and charming and carries a simple but powerful message of love for everyone, whoever they are and whatever they look like, but after the interval it’s a bit of a shambles. A 30 minute cut and some tighter direction would have greatly improved it.
American fiction
Jeffrey Wright is extremely weak and selfish in this trick, familiar with the feature film directed by ex-journalist Cord Jefferson, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, about a black writer who struggles terribly for his white publisher’s thirst for for stereotypical black stories. A cringefest, but a good one, out on February 2nd.
