Audiences, apparently, are not what they used to be.1 In 2012, the British critic Mark Shenton called Bianca Jagger a âstupid womanâ for taking photographs during the opera, and in return was accused of assault (Telegraph 2012). The following year an American critic was thrown out of the theatre for snatching a phone out of a fellow spectatorâs hand (Williamson 2013). In 2013â2014, the West End appearances of both Martin Freeman in Trafalgar Studiosâ Richard III (Denham 2014) and Tom Hiddleston in Donmar Warehouseâs Coriolanus (Evening Standard 2014) attracted complaints about the rambunctious responses of their fans, often assumed to be first-time theatregoers lured to the event via the starsâ film and television work. In July 2015, theatre Twitter lit up with outrage when an audience member climbed onstage to charge his phone during a Broadway production of Hand to God (Gajanan 2015a); then the very next month footage circulated of Benedict Cumberbatch pleading at the stage door with audiences to stop filming his performances of Hamlet, calling the constant red lights âmortifyingâ (Malvern 2015); then 2 months later again, in October 2015, Keira Knightley was forced to pause her first preview of ThĂŠrèse Raquin following a marriage proposal from the stalls (Biggs 2015). In 2017, after her earlier calls to ban eating in theatres altogether (Hutchison 2016), Imelda Staunton decided to outlaw food from her own London production of Edward Albeeâs Whoâs Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Snow 2017a), while on Broadway Reed Birney reported annoyance at the infelicity of theatregoers âgigglingâ during his 1984 torture scenes (Riedel 2017). These incidences were interspersed with regular reports of diatribes delivered directly from the stage by actors such as Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig (Guardian 2009), Richard Griffiths (BBC 2005), Kevin Spacey (BBC 2004), Laurence Fox (Beaumont-Thomas 2016), and Patti LuPone (Gajanan 2015b). These moments of âstage rageâ all intended to shame offending audience members into submission during the moment of performance.
Only a handful of the most widely reported transgressions over the past few years, such incidences of bad behaviour have prompted commentators to claim that theatre spectatorship has reached âa new lowâ. According to critics such as Richard Jordan , seen ranting in 2016 in The Stage newspaper about âthe worst West End audience everâ, this is a barometer of how much âaudiences have changedâ over the years (Jordan 2016: n.p.). Theatre has apparently reached a tipping pointâa âfever pitchâ (Theatre Charter 2014: n.p.)âin which something has to give.
That âsomethingâ is now giving way. Over the teen years of the twenty-first century, the discourse around theatre spectatorship has been pulling ever further apart, caught between two opposing forces. On the one hand, we have seen a splurge of spectatorial efforts within the English-speaking world to re-edify fellow audience members in how to behave. First the UKâs Theatre Charter asked theatregoers to commit to signing an audience contract: a list of defined dos and donâts for harmonious theatregoing. Then came the Cumberphone Campaign , which, rather than asking audiences to modify their behaviour directly, instead offers practical advice to producers on how to discourage mobile phone usage in their patrons, and also pushes for wider technological changes like the introduction of a âTheatre Modeâ for smartphones. These high-profile campaigns have been surrounded by wave after wave of blog posts, news stories, think pieces, and, most recently, the release of the book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Going to the Theatre (West End Producer 2017), which came with âa free shiny badge, granting you official status as a Theatre Prefect â (Nick Hern Books 2017a). Whether the tone is indignant or kindly, remonstrative or tongue-in-cheek, these accounts can be seen as a collective attempt to enforce the limits of appropriate behaviour.
On the other hand, these censorious campaigns have been coming to a head at a moment when theatre itself is becoming increasingly participatory and interactive. The twenty-first century rise in âimmersiveâ performance , which claims to challenge the rules of spectatorship in âadventurous and dynamicâ ways, is often viewed in opposition to the traditional âstiflingâ theatre environment (Frieze 2016: 2),2 while the newly coined âextra-liveâ movement has begun to pioneer more inclusive and ârelaxed â styles of performance. Extra-live proponents have been fundamental in redesigning the theatre-going experience to facilitate access for audience members who have difficulty adhering to traditional behavioural expectations: people including âbabies and carers, [âŚ] people with dementia [and] profound multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) and those on the autism spectrumâ (Fletcher-Watson 2015: 62). The conflict arises when these two models of audiencing collide. Whereas commentators like Richard Jordan (2016) have blamed the rise in poor behaviour on institutional efforts to broaden the appeal of live performanceâsuggesting that new theatregoers have been sullying the traditional performance space with their desire for a good night outâothers argue the reverse: that relaxing the rules overall is to be welcomed for precisely this reason, as a way of widening participation and removing barriers to access. By creating a less restrictive environment and catering to the needs and wishes of a more representative audience, theatre might finally scrub itself free from the taint of cultural elitism and become a space where peopleâall peopleâcan truly feel at home.
Of course, these divisions are nothing new. The war between engagement and elitism, âactiveâ and âpassiveâ audiencing , has been waging for centuries: an opposition which moreover has been the subject of countless scholarly examinations, as this book goes on to describe. Neither is this polemic unique to theatre. Right at this minute arts institutions around the world are struggling to balance preserving the pleasures of quiet receptivity with encouraging more inclusive forms of participation . So what does this book hope to offer?
Firstly, while the field of cultural studies has long traced the complex history of changing audience behaviour, the teen years of the twenty-first century have seen the battleground shiftâparticularly within the live and performing arts. This is now a debate that has the word âetiquetteâ as its nucleus. Derived from the Old French word estiquette, meaning âto attachâ, our modern understanding of the word
can be traced back to the royal court of French King Louis XIV (1638â1715), who employed small placards called etiquettes as reminders to courtiers of the behavior expected at court, such as remembering not to walk in particular areas of the palace gardens. (Taylor and Williams 2017: xi)
In fact, Caroline Heim has drawn a correlation between the mid-eighteenth century placement of French police outside theatres to control misbehaviour, and the contemporaneous introduction of the word etiquette (2015: 66). Theatre etiquette is by no means a new phenomenonâand yet only recently has this term become synonymous with campaigns against audience bad behaviour. A search on the news database Nexis for âtheatre etiquetteâ suggests that this exact phrase had not appeared in any UK newspaper prior to the 1980s, with only a single article published in 1989 using that term.3 Over the following decades, a further eight articles can be found containing the phrase âtheatre etiquetteâ across the 1990s, rising to 32 in the 2000s, and then to 139 between January 2010 and December 2017. This count does not include the thousands of additional online news sites, social media posts, and blog entries that have been written on this subject: a trend which according to Google has been rising steadily since the turn of the millennium. Whereas popular and industry discourses have been awash with arguments about the ri...