Critical Comment: Noise annoys
Is audience behaviour getting worse? Or is it just that new technology is becoming more obtrusive? Before anyone accuses me of being a Grumpy Old Man, I should say that I can scarcely remember a time when London offered such a wide range of high-quality shows: Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Seafarer, The Alchemist, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Waiting for Godot and Cabaret are all, in different ways, superb. At the same time, audiences seem to be getting less considerate.
We’ve all heard the stories of Richard Griffiths interrupting performances of The History Boys in London and New York because of ringing mobile phones. Some old pros argue that Griffiths should have ploughed on. I’m with Griffiths. When he stopped the show on Broadway, he told a family of four, each of whose mobiles had gone off in the space of five minutes: “You’ve shown the most incredible disrespect to a thousand people in this room.” I gather he was wildly applauded.
I had my own Richard Griffiths moment in the West End during the first night of Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre where my attention was distracted for the whole of the first half by the luminous glare of a Blackberry being frantically used by a gent about six seats in. Others were as angry as myself and, in the interval, I beetled off in search of the house manager to register a complaint - something on which she promised to act.
Coming back to my seat, I found there was a small posse of disgruntled theatregoers holding an informal meeting. What staggered me was to learn that the bonkers Blackberry-basher was actually a well-known theatrical agent! As soon as he returned, I fear I lost my temper, charging up to him and telling him that if he didn’t stop fiddling with his little toy, I’d get him thrown out of the theatre. To be fair, he apologised and sat quiet as a church mouse in the second half. But, although I regret losing my temper, I still find it incredible that an agent should be carrying on his office business during a West End first night.
Obviously, new technology is leading to an outbreak of bad theatrical manners. Even the amplified sound of a ringing phone - which many theatres now use as a reminder to switch off before the show starts - is having a spoiling effect. It’s a tactic they use at the Coliseum, but I’m not sure I want the opening bars of La Traviata prefaced by something that sounds like a fire alarm. I can’t bear to think of the effect it would have on the famously rippling sound that kicks off Das Rheingold.
Phones and pagers are not the only problem. What about the manic coughers? The critic James Agate wrote in the 1930s that only people suffering acute bronchitis seem to go to the London theatre, so clearly the problem is not new. The old argument was that endless throat-clearing was a sign of boredom or irritation. I remember Tyrone Guthrie said, after his production of Tamburlaine The Great had spectacularly flopped on its Broadway first night, that “the next morning the notices put the nail in the coughing.” Harold Pinter goes even further and says “coughing is an act of aggression”.
My own view is slightly different. I think coughing is a sign of embarrassment. I’ve noticed how young people, often on their first visit to a Shakespeare play, will indulge in a hollow, hacking cough that has more to do with nervousness than a tickle in the throat. The only problem is that a clarinet-style cough in the gallery will then get taken up by the trombone section in the stalls until eventually the whole theatre swells with orchestral sound.
“Disrespect” was Richard Griffiths’ word; and under that heading I’d include texting, phoning, coughing, talking, eating and slurping endless bottles of water as if a trip to the theatre was as dehydrating as an excursion to the Gobi desert. But worse than any of these is insulting the actors. No one who was there will ever forget the first night of Krystian Lupa’s production of Three Sisters at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. It was, admittedly, interminable. That was, however, no excuse for the way a section of the King’s Theatre audience greeted every gift-line in the last act - such as “will this never end?” - with a jeering laugh. I felt sorry for the American actors, who were simply carrying out the director’s instructions, and ashamed of Scottish philistinism.
It is sometimes a pleasure to sit with an audience, especially in intimate spaces like Stratford’s Swan, the Young Vic and the Donmar Warehouse, and share in the communal rapture. But in the West End I often seem to come across an army of rustlers and rattlers, prattlers and pagers clearly not engaged in the event. I’ve no idea what the answer is. You can have schools for actors, directors and writers but hardly one for audiences. Maybe the only solution, as with my enemy agent at Cabaret, is an appeal to higher authority and the assumption of a Lear-like rage.