Hugh Linehan: Live audiences are great, except when they’re not

Have you booked your tickets yet? With remaining Covid restrictions set to be lifted on Monday, many people are no doubt looking forward to returning to crowded cinemas, theatres and music venues unencumbered by masks and free of social distancing regulations.

Over the past two years, much digital ink has been spilt – some of it here – on pontificating about how the pandemic has revealed to us the importance of communal live events. Nothing beats the transcendental, shared experience of being part of a real audience in a real place experiencing a play or a concert or a film together. Right?

Not so fast, as Jean-Paul Sartre might have said. It was the French philosopher who coined the phrase “hell is other people”, and one unremarked but soon to be tested hypothesis about lockdown is that it has caused us to forget what a bunch of wretched, ignorant swine our fellow human beings can be when they’re up close and personal.

If you think I exaggerate, consider the events which unfolded last Saturday at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, during Northern Ireland Opera’s sold-out production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods.

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The Belfast Telegraph reports that audience members repeatedly talked and moved about the auditorium during the first half of the show, which has been enthusiastically reviewed in this newspaper and elsewhere.

“As they came off stage, actors complained to company managers that the conduct of the audience was disrupting the performance,” wrote the Telegraph. “Front of house staff also reported that they were being abused as they tried to appeal to some audience members to be quiet and to stop drinking in the auditorium.”

At the interval, the cast and members of the orchestra were told by director Cameron Menzies that the show was being cancelled and that they should leave the theatre by the back door.

Northern Ireland Opera declined to comment further when I contacted them about the incident, beyond confirming that it had taken place and that it was “looking forward to and focusing on this week’s final six performances of Into the Woods”.

Prissy bourgeois rules

There is a school of thought which argues that contemporary expectations of how an audience should behave are rooted in a set of prissy, 19th century bourgeois rules about remaining quiet and motionless during a performance. Before that, audience members would shout at the stage and at each other, eat, drink, wander about and relieve themselves openly. Which sounds pretty much like the behaviour of the people in the Lyric last Saturday. Some theorists argue we should throw off these stuffy Victorian conventions in order to return to a less passive, more primal relationship between spectator and performer.

Perhaps. And perhaps we should bring back bear-baiting and public executions while we’re at it. It seems unlikely that the audience at Into the Woods were some sort of radical collective dedicated to breaking down society’s expectations of what live musical theatre should be. One might more reasonably surmise that many of them were over-stimulated by pre-show refreshments and under-invested in Stephen Sondheim’s deconstruction of gender and power in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Different rules apply to different audiences in different contexts. Many theatres won’t readmit people if nature calls during the performance. Stern admonitions about switching off phones and not talking are par for the course in cinemas (whether they’re observed is another matter). Popular music events are much more laissez-faire, which is as it should be. But a common phenomenon across nearly all genres in recent years has been the perceptible decline in standards of consideration for others. Is it because people are more habituated to home entertainment and don’t realise or care that they should act differently when they’re out? Has the lure of the always-on digital device lessened their awareness of where they are and that they’re making life miserable for those around them? Are they more drunk or stoned than heretofore? Whatever the reason, more and more seem to prefer continuing their tedious shouted conversations after the lights go down rather than paying any attention to what’s on stage.

Versions of this phenomenon can also be seen at sports events. It’s worth noting that last Saturday’s audience at the Lyric was a corporate block-booking. This may help to answer the puzzle of why people would pay large sums of money to see a show or a match and then proceed to ignore it: they often haven’t spent anything at all. With arts and sports increasingly dependent on corporate partnerships and sponsorships, tickets end up being distributed to people who are just there for the boozy pre-show function and the Insta-friendly Big Night Out. They’re the antithesis of an engaged audience, and unfortunately the rest of us will just have to suffer. Hell remains other people.