Sex, miscarriage, murder, insanity and suicide are the staple of every TV soap, often several times a week. But on stage at the Royal Opera House last Thursday, in a production of Lucia di Lammermoor, directed by Katie Mitchell such themes were greeted with boos from some of the audience; others cheered.
The story concerns Lucia tricked into marriage to preserve the family fortunes; Lucia’s lover returns to find she is taken. She kills her new husband, loses a child and goes mad; her lover kills himself. Traditionally, the women are not much part of the action in Donizetti’s opera. In contrast, Mitchell has chosen to depict Lucia’s plight not off stage but on – and vividly.
Why is it increasingly only considered acceptable for audiences to demonstrate their feelings on a spectrum that begins with polite clapping and ends in an ovation or several, with nothing “unruly” in between? If a musical, play or opera is intended to make an audience think, then, presumably, members of an audience are entitled to think differently, so why can’t this be articulated?
Given the plethora of productions that have the label “thought-provoking” slapped on them, isn’t it time to return to a little more genuine interaction? Of course, this should show some manners. It is not to be confused with a single individual in the balcony, two sheets to the wind, who heckles through Othello as enthusiastically as a seven-year-old at a production of Jack and the Beanstalk. “Look out, Desdemona! He’s behind you!”
In March, Laurence Fox, playing Charles de Gaulle in a performance of The Patriotic Traitor, swore at a vociferous member of the audience and exited the stage two lines from the end, announcing: “This cunt in the front row has ruined it for everyone.”
This is a particularly pertinent observation since, while a few lucky people would have purchased their seats at a reasonable price, attending opera, theatre and concerts can be a luxury pursuit. Many theatregoers and opera lovers will want their uninterrupted money’s worth and there perhaps lies the challenge.
In Elizabethan times, the Globe held 1,500. The well-to-do paid 5d and sat on cushions, happily spitting on the groundlings or stinkards, standing in the pit below, having paid a penny in the box to enter. The audience ate, drank, chatted, caroused and talked back to the actors. As in, Lady Macbeth to Macbeth: “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did you not speak?” Cue for a roar from the audience, who may have seen the play several times over – and, who knows, influenced perhaps a possible modification from Mr Shakespeare.
Playwrights understand this process when a production is a work in progress, amended in rehearsals and previews. So why should it stop when a play or opera is at risk of becoming fossilised in performance after performance? Arthur Miller in his autobiography, Timebends, explains how, in 1949, he rewrote a major scene in Death of a Salesman because it didn’t work for the three actors, including the star, Lee J Cobb.
The play received glowing reviews. “There is stageworthy dialogue and literary dialogue,” Miller writes, “and no one quite knows… why a dramatic line lands in an audience and a literary one sails over its head.” Audiences, when genuinely moved, or enraged, know. They feel the authenticity. This is the collective and, sometimes, electrifying part of the experience as much as whatever is happening on stage.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when the arts were funded as part of the good society, leftwing companies such as Monstrous Regiment, Belt and Braces and Red Ladder toured in productions that, unlike much of the material on offer now, reflected their audiences’ concerns, interests and humour. I remember productions such as Red Ladder’s It Makes You Sick, the story of an engineer, his ulcer and the NHS (time for a revival?). Performances were in hospitals, working men’s clubs and village halls; audiences did speak their minds, defying the genteel appetite for muteness.
In participatory theatre in which the audience is part of the performance, that tradition lives on but elsewhere, too often, the audience is tamed. It was a process that was accelerated by Richard Wagner, in the 1870s, when he built his own theatre. He decided the lights, previously left ablaze with candles or bulbs, should be dimmed; the audience were given uncomfortable chairs and the unspoken order was to shut up, focus on the stage and listen. The bourgeois hold on the “good” audience has gripped tighter ever since.
Still, even when complying with the rules, watching live can bring its own rewards, above and beyond appreciation of the performance. A study in 2014 analysed 670 pupils from 49 school groups who had watched performances of Hamlet and A Christmas Carol; some had been at the theatres, others watched on film. Those who attended the performances were better able to recognise and appreciate what characters thought and felt. For example, 83% of students who attended the play could identify Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Hamlet’s friends, while only 45% of the control group correctly identified the characters.
One academic study is easily mocked, but magic is hard to deny. At the age of 12, in the early 1960s, I came to London on a school outing from my comprehensive school to see Lionel Bart’s Oliver!. It was the first “proper” live play I had seen. The thrill of seeing the seemingly impossible on stage; the yeast of being with others equally enraptured, provided a dual impact that has yet to fade. Last week, it was announced that from September, it would no longer be a requirement for pupils taking a GCSE in drama to attend a live performance. One more curtain is falling on a collective experience and too many of us continue to stay silent.