Just how bad can an audience get?
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A recent performance of The Bodyguard in Manchester, England, created front-page news when police had to be called to deal with unruly behavior. Staff at the Palace Theatre trying to quiet a particularly loud patron was greeted with “unprecedented levels of violence.”
The Guardian has reported disruptions to performances of Bat Out of Hell and The Drifters Girl in London, as well as Jersey Boys in Edinburgh. One regular devotee of the Royal Opera House was banned for life after heckling a child singer. (This was also front-page news in the UK, which gives you a hint of what a gun-free culture can provide by easing up media space for outrage of this kind.)
More recently a Daily Mail photographer was reprimanded for stealthily taking pictures of a naked James Norton at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
It should be noted that Norton was naked due to his role in a stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. But audience members have gotten naked too, as comedian Tom Houghton reported, with couples engaging in loud sex in the loos during his performances.
All this mayhem is on top of the menace of crinkly candy wrappers, the blaring of cell phones, and the incessant loud questioning of audience members who can’t follow the plot (I always whisper my confusion).
I’ve seen people glued to their phones in the middle of shows, reading texts and sending them too. What on earth do they write? “Sorry, can’t text, at the theatre. What did U think of the latest Succession?”
I have a much-repeated joke I like to tell just as the lights are dimming: “I have to leave my phone on as I’m expecting an important call in about 20 minutes.” (My wife is sick of hearing it.) But it’s a joke because of course I’d never actually do that. But a lot of people actually leave their phones on. And if it rings, they take the call!
People today belt out all the lyrics — whether they actually know them or not. And it’s no good trying to explain to these disrupters that they’re not in their living room, because everywhere has become their living room. They probably bring with them a remote control to try to freeze the action on stage when they go to the bathroom.
COVID-19 did many awful things, including killing almost 7 million people around the world. But it also created a generation of what I call Thoughtless Audience Monsters (TAMs), who are like a theatrical version of Karens.
These TAMs, not knowing how to behave in a public setting, ruin the experience for other patrons who are trying to follow and appreciate what’s happening on stage. With the high price of drinks at venue bars, people often imbibe on the way, arriving at the show pre-drunk and ready to rumble.
Even as a teenager I knew enough not to drop acid at a Grateful Dead concert until they actually started playing. And if that meant I didn’t achieve full velocity until midway through “Terrapin Station,” so be it. There may have been some arm waving, but I never tried to sing along.
People today belt out all the lyrics — whether they actually know them or not. And it’s no good trying to explain to these disrupters that they’re not in their living room, because everywhere has become their living room. They probably bring with them a remote control to try to freeze the action on stage when they go to the bathroom.
These people think it’s all about them, Springsteen singing just for them, Hamilton Hamiltoning just for them. Or maybe they think everything is a Mets game and they can fire at will (“Kill the director! That performance was out!”).
Of course you could say this isn’t anything particularly new.
In 1913 there was famously a riot at the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the Paris crowd making their sincere displeasure known. Someone in the gallery called for “Un docteur!” to which someone else responded, “Non, un dentiste!”
But arguably the worst behavior of an audience member goes back to April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth ruined a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, by shooting President Lincoln and then leaping onto the stage.
As the immortal (well, mortal) joke has it, “But what did you think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
Obviously not much. Poor manners have ruined theatrical experiences for centuries. In Shakespeare’s time, unruly audiences hooted and applauded at their pleasure, and often threw rotten fruit at the stage.
And though people may complain today about the shortage of bathrooms at the theater, Elizabethans just relieved themselves wherever they felt like it, often where they stood at The Globe.
At least they had the excuse that superior plumbing was still 300 years away.
It’s true that Ticketmaster has been gouging punters beyond all reason. Attending a play cost only a penny in Shakespeare’s day. Some TAMs today probably think by causing a scene they’re getting their full money’s worth.
But they should remember that their remote actually works at home, where they can stop the action wherever they like, and do whatever they like in the privacy of their own bathroom.
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J.B. Miller is an American writer living in England, and is the author of My Life in Action Painting and The Satanic Nurses and Other Literary Parodies.
