I enjoyed an item from the "In Our Pages" section of the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday, recalling a riot at La ComedieFrancaise in Paris in 1924. It happened during a performance of the "much discussed drama" Le Tombeau sous l'Arc de Triomphe (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), which, according to the Tribune, caused:
". . . roars of protest, yelling and whistling. The balcony shook its fists at the loge, and the loges waved their fingers before each other's noses in violent discussion. And what was it all about? A son's defiance of the traditional French respect for paternal authority! Even when father and son were reunited, the audience was hardly ready to accept the reconciliation . . . this was `anarchy', as one old man yelled."
There are two points I want to make about this. The first is that I've checked my dictionary and it turns out that a "loge" is a theatre box. But the more important point is that the story illustrates just how live live entertainment used to be, and how bland it has become in the intervening years.
Of course it wasn't just in Paris that audiences used to riot - it happened in our own national theatre too. As late as the 1930s, according to some sources, audience members routinely smuggled guns into the Abbey in case the playwright tried to make a political point they didn't agree with.
Nowadays, the nearest you'll get to a riot at the theatre is the interval rush to the bar. And even here, audience behaviour is so restrained I find running madly out of the auditorium as soon as the curtain falls nearly always guarantees you first place in the queue. Other than this, the only spontaneous audience reaction you're likely to see now is when one audience member falls asleep (usually the guy who was first to the bar) and everybody else starts giggling at him.
But if we can leave the theatre for a moment (no running, please!), the decline of truly "live" entertainment is even more obvious in the area of popular music. Not only is every second band you see these days a "tribute" to some real band which existed before rock 'n' roll history ended sometime during the Iran-Iraq war, but - except for those acoustic-type concerts where knowing fans irritate the rest of us by constantly calling for obscure Bsides from the singer's back-collection - there's no real interaction between audiences and performers any more.
Now I know what you're thinking - that in the very same edition of the Herald Tribune last Tuesday, there was a report describing how "Satanist shock-rocker" Marilyn Manson stormed off a stage in Perth, Australia this week after being bombarded with missiles and abuse. Some 400 fans were treated for minor injuries, and Manson reportedly blamed his walk-out on the crowd's behaviour (this from a Satanist shock-rocker!).
Well, yes there was such a report (very well spotted, by the way) and OK, it sounds like that was a seriously live concert. On the other hand, it was also a concert where the performer was a devil-worshipper and the audience was Australian, so no-one involved there could be said to be exactly normal.
The fact is, most concerts these days run a pretty much preordained course. For instance, when was the last time you were in an audience that didn't demand an encore? Not recently, I'm guessing. So routine have encores become, in fact, that most bands and venues factor them in, so the "encores" are part of the performance you would have got anyway!
This is the new participation theatre: we know the band is coming back, and they know it too. But still they're waving and saying "Goodnight, folks, you've been a great audience," and we're yelling "mooore!" and clapping, and stomping our feet, like our lives depend on it.
In fact, from a situation where musicians used to have to earn an encore, now all the pressure is on the fans. Many people would be mortified if the band refused to come back. "We must have been a really lousy audience," they'd think. "We'll have to work on that clapping and stomping technique before the next concert."
Having said this, really live concert experiences are not for the fainthearted: only once have I seen someone booed off a stage, and it was more mortifying for me than it could have been for him.
It was back in 1981, just after Iraq had invaded Iran or vice versa, indirectly bringing about the collapse of teenage rebellion in the West. And in case the guy in question still has any feelings, I won't name him. But he was a support act for Moving Hearts, and he took the risky step - considering he was playing for people who hadn't paid to see him - of presenting a set of German pre-war cabaret songs.
He accompanied himself on the piano, and pretty soon that was the only company he had. The audience sat through the first few songs in bored silence - there was even some polite applause. Then a few people started whistling (not in tune with the music) and by half-way through, relations had degenerated into outright hostility.
I say half-way through, because the singer continued regardless. And although there was nothing being thrown on the stage except insults, it was still terrifying. I was an innocent young fella just up from the country and, looking around at the audience, I was wondering if they were all on drugs.
Finally, mercifully, the set ended and the performer doffed his hat and walked off. And when Christy Moore took to the stage after him, he said he'd spoken to the singer backstage and he (the singer) wasn't too upset, because the songs had provoked the same reaction when performed in 1930s Berlin.
It was a nice touch of political satire, and for the singer to have been completely vindicated it would only have required the third World War to break soon afterwards. Sadly for him, the 1980s passed without such a development. But at least he was safely out of the building by then.