At the opening night of Susan Stroman’s superlative production of Crazy For You, I spotted the broadcaster Vanessa Feltz. It was something of a surprise: Feltz has been persona non grata in theatreland since an episode of ITV’s This Morning in April, when she and Alison Hammond discussed the topic of disruptive audience behaviour in theatres. “Isn’t the whole point of going to a musical that you sing along to all the bits you know and, when you don’t know the words, you just make them up?” asked Feltz. “Isn’t that what everybody does? And very, very loudly while eating an ice cream?”
Whether she was serious or not, Feltz’s comments ignited a firestorm. Denunciations by leading performers duly followed on Twitter. Hammond, in particular, issued grovelling statements of apology. At Crazy For You, I am delighted to report, Feltz appeared to be on best behaviour.
For the first six months of this year, poor audience behaviour has inspired headline after headline in newspaper arts pages. But, for my money, the focus on musical theatre has been misleading. It’s frustrating when audiences treat a performance by a trained professional like a boozy karaoke session, but, since theatre returned from the pandemic, serious drama has been afflicted too. Forget mere mobile phone usage: my recent rage-triggers have involved people knitting scarves, fumbling suspiciously close to each other’s underpants, and merrily sharing out picnics.
There’s a left-leaning school of thought that anyone complaining about a fidgety fellow theatregoer is “gatekeeping”—that is, imposing class-based behaviours designed to exclude newcomers to the arts. Aspects of this thinking inform Kirsty Sedgman’s book The Reasonable Audience, the go-to tome on the subject, although Sedgman’s work is too sophisticated to be quite so simplistically characterised.
In my experience, however, the most selfish members of an audience are usually the eldest and wealthiest. Nothing carries in the stalls like the vocal commentary between two hard-of-hearing octogenarians. Entitlement is equally distributed among those who’ve paid £200 for their seats and those high profile enough to be invited for free. I’m still marvelling at the chutzpah of the newspaper columnist who dug out his phone 10 minutes into the press night of James Graham’s Dear England and texted away until his equally prominent wife dug him in the ribs.
Too much commentary about “behaviour policing” in theatres stinks of the bigotry of low expectations: it is an insult to young people to suggest, as many arts writers do, that they can’t sit still in a theatre. Other arts writers diagnose our epidemic of fidgeting as a symptom of mass smartphone addiction: technology has wrecked our concentration spans. The Evening Standard’s thoughtful critic Nick Curtis, writing in April, cited not only the ubiquity of phones but of social media as a 24-hour presence in our lives: “We have got used to recording every event and aggressively expressing every thought immediately.”
This line of thinking is substantially correct, to my mind, but only gets halfway to the point. A few months ago, I appeared on the spiritual podcast The Sacred and found myself comparing my religious experiences to the transformative experience of theatre. Similarly, when I interviewed the choreographer Akram Khan earlier this year, he described theatre not only as “the last human ritual we’ve got left” but as “a contract”: “When you buy a ticket, you sign a contract. I’m gonna give you two hours of my entire focus to be in the present. I don’t know the person to the left of me. I don’t know the person to the right. But a thousand of us will be sitting there collectively, giving you two hours of our time.”
A society that forgets ritual will forget theatre. And a society that forgets how to behave at church—or any religious venue—will forget how to behave in a theatre. Disruption in the stalls is a form of profanity, and the collapse of shared audience norms is but one more symptom of a radically secularising society.
The pandemic rendered gatherings fraught. Lockdown also introduced a reporting bias, giving the naturally anxious a licence to police those around them. As a twitchy type myself, I suspect we’re probably more likely now to be denouncing troublemakers.
But the pandemic also established that behaviour changes when theatres demand it: the incidence of mask-wearing shot up whenever directors made a pre-show appearance to politely request it. Venues should be equally unafraid to make clear their expectations of behaviour—from a human face, not a droning Tannoy. It is not gatekeeping to explain to newcomers that theatre requires focus. It is an initiation to the sacred.
