Stage Struck

Irish audiences won't walk the walk, says PETER CRAWLEY

Life, I’m sure you’ll agree, is just too short. So when you find yourself in a theatre watching, say, the third hour of a fiercely serious, purportedly experimental play that combines Brechtian verfrumdungseffekt and Balinese mask techniques to dramatise the tumultuously eventful life of its 19-year-old solo performer – and his views on society – what’s stopping you from making for the exit?

Walking out of a show is a big no-no here. You don’t like to do it. It draws attention, it disturbs people around you, it distracts the performers, who, you generously decide, are not solely responsible for the howling, soul-sapping vortex that was once your evening.

So instead you just seethe with resentment, or pray for a fire, or do that fantasy trade-off thing with hellish alternatives (this play vs un-anaesthetised root canal; this vs chewing through my own ankle).

This dilemma comes up again and again in heated arguments with friends, academics, amateur economists and professional ethicists as routinely as that Clash song invades the iPod of my mind. Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Years ago I had a tutor who advised that not only should you leave a show if it isn’t working for you, you should leave noisily, preferably yelling abuse at the performers and tearing up the seats. The class wasn’t keen on the idea, but it’s left me with two inflexible convictions. Walking out is exactly the right thing to do; and I would never, ever do it.

As a critic, of course, sticking around until the end is more than a basic courtesy. You want a show to succeed, to get better, to know everything there is to know before forming an opinion. There is also the perverse fascination, with something mesmerically awful, that it might actually get worse. I’ve seen shows so bad that they’ve actually given me energy. Regardless of quality, I’ll want to know what’s next.

This has been on my mind since I attended the European Theatre Prize in Wroclaw, a festival of such provocation and controversy that most people only go in order to walk out of something. An early to-do involved one audience member invading the stage of Roderigo García’s Accidents to rescue a live lobster being prepared in as distressing a way as possible for the grill.

Later, while watching a woman invade the stage of García's Scatter My Ashes Over Mickey(in which hamsters and frogs come in for horrible, albeit not life-ending, treatment) I thought her principled stance, opposition and rejection was a better engagement than my own: interpretive, disdainful, numb.

Nothing could have torn me from an open-rehearsal of Polish director Krystian Lupa's Persona, a show that kept revving up and spluttering out like a Lada. As people dribbled out with each breakdown, the performers considered their desertion.

“Let them leave,” said Piotr Skiba. “They’ll feel better. We’ll feel better.” Slipping back into character he continued, “What has just begun will either be a masterpiece or trash.”

By the end, I was convinced it was the former. And that there’s only one way to know for sure.

pcrawley@irishtimes.com