Good morning. The next time you go to a play, you may find that the most shocking scenes are taking place off stage. That, at least, is the pattern in a spate of recent dramas in the stalls across Britain: from stories about an usher being punched after asking rowdy audience members to tone it down in Edinburgh to a heckler barracking a child actor at the Royal Opera House and illicit nude photos being taken of James Norton in the West End, there are multiplying worries that the traditional hush of the theatre is under threat.
On Good Friday, a performance of the Bodyguard in Manchester was stopped and police were called to deal with two audience members who insisted on tunelessly singing along to I Will Always Love You while everyone else tried to listen. One measure of the strength of feeling: the furious reception for TV presenter Alison Hammond’s prior suggestion that she would be skipping the show as a result of the theatre’s approach to audience participation, and her subsequent grovelling apology. The stage is meant to arouse our passions, but not, surely, like this.
So is something new going on here – or are debates about proper audience etiquette an overblown fuss that’s old as theatre itself? And what can – or should – be done to fix the problem? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Kirsty Sedgman, an expert on audience behaviour, about who gets to set the rules – and why it matters. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
NHS | Junior doctors may keep striking for another year in their bitter pay dispute with the government, despite NHS leaders’ growing alarm about how the industrial action is disrupting patient care. Sources at the BMA, the main doctors’ union, warned of the possible escalation as hospitals prepare for a four day strike beginning on Tuesday morning.
Israel | Benjamin Netanyahu has reversed his decision to fire the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for warning that his judicial overhaul was harming the military. After an unprecedented surge in protests over the decision, Netanyahu announced on Monday night that Gallant would stay in his post.
Northern Ireland | A crowd has attacked police with petrol bombs and other missiles during a parade by dissident republicans in Derry on the eve of Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland. About a dozen people in camouflage gear marched through the neighbourhood to commemorate the 1916 Rising with the backing of Saoradh, the political wing of the New IRA.
US national security | The US is attempting to mend fences with key allies, after claims in leaked Pentagon documents of spying on friendly nations, including South Korea and Israel. The leak represents Washington’s worst national security breach in years and included details about Ukraine’s lack of ammunition and US intelligence collection methods used against Russia.
Religion | The Dalai Lama has apologised after he faced allegations of inappropriate behaviour when he kissed a young boy on the lips and asking him to “suck his tongue” at a public event in India. The office of the Dalai Lama said his behaviour had been “innocent and playful”.
In depth: ‘We’ve become increasingly used to judging other people’s behaviour’
Kirsty Sedgman, a scholar of cultural studies and theatre lecturer at the University of Bristol, has spent much of her career studying the rules set by an audience. She’s just written her third book about it, On Being Unreasonable, which expands her thinking about how different audiences’ conflicting understanding of “reasonable” behaviour complicates our expectations of others in all sorts of domains, from public transport and queueing to rows between neighbours on Nextdoor. But her work starts in the theatre – which is difficult enough, and only appears to be getting more so.
“It’s complicated!” she said. “There’s a reason it takes a whole book to unpack. But I think the key point is that we’re not able to have productive conversations about all this stuff, because everybody is yelling at everybody else. There could be more productive ways for the theatre industry to work towards a solution – but as it is, I fear that things are going to get worse before they get better.”
Here are some ways to think about why that’s happening, and why it matters beyond the confines of the theatre.
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A brief history of unruly audiences
Strangely, the good old days of polite theatregoing always seem to have just finished. This 2009 piece asks: “What on earth is happening out there in theatreland? It’s like the G20 riots.” And as long ago as 360BC, Sedgman points out, Plato was grumbling about “the catcalls and uncouth yelling of the audience, as it is nowadays”. (Still, he added, they “could always be disciplined and controlled by a stick”.)
Similarly, Arifa Akbar asks in this piece: “Have we forgotten the apple throwers at The Rivals in RB Sheridan’s day? And what about the groundlings at the 16th-century Globe who were sold pippins, oranges, nuts, gingerbread and ale during a show?”
The current etiquette has its roots in the work of Matthew Arnold, the 19th-century poet and critic, who saw theatre as a way to stop society falling into anarchy. “He was incredibly influential at a time where sudden migrations to urban centres because of mass industrialisation were making cultural elites start to panic,” Sedgman said.
“He saw culture as a powerful tool to civilise the masses – and he thought that everyone needed to be trained out of using the arts as a sociable experience. That’s really when those rules were imposed wholesale, and you started to see everything from conductors stopping concerts and berating audience members to plainclothes policemen being posted in the stalls.”
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The new shushing
Since about the turn of the millennium, Sedgman said, “we have seen an increasing sense from a lot of audience members that what they loved” – what Peter Brook called the “good” kind of silence, “when everyone is so keyed to the same point that there is this extraordinary life” – “was under threat”. Meanwhile, “another camp has argued that theatre has been, at least since the 19th century, predominantly an older, white, middle class pursuit, and if we’re serious about a wider range of audiences we should think about how off-putting that can be for some people”.
In one strand, people like performer and activist Jess Thom, who has Tourette syndrome, have pioneered “relaxed performances” where somebody like her can feel more comfortable. In another, the American playwright Dominique Morisseau argued that Black audiences were being alienated by white theatregoers’ attempts to police their reactions. Sedgman uses church as an analogy: “For some people, that means an atmosphere of reverent silence. For others it’s more exuberantly joyful.” When the two traditions collide, adherents of both can come away feeling shortchanged.
In her book, Sedgman says that this is not about saying that “people from marginalised communities are unable to enact self-discipline”. Instead, she says, those who are “poor, or young, or a person of colour” face particular scrutiny “even if their behaviour is exactly the same as the rich older white person next to them”.
In any case, since the pandemic, all of this has been heightened – and complicated by a new risk that good faith disagreements about a preferred theatrical atmosphere can become toxic. In this Twitter thread posted last week, Sedgman argued that a new set of obligations has become “a moral act of societal care” but also created “an unreasonable curtain-twitching urge to watch and snitch”.
“There was a positive surge in communitarian thinking, but then it started to fall apart,” she said. “We’ve become increasingly used to judging other people’s behaviour, and also increasingly belligerent in response – in saying “you can’t tell me what to do”.
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The jukebox problem and how to fix it
To all of this history, you might say: there’s no norm for good audience behaviour that includes annoying everyone else in the theatre and then making a scene when you’re asked to stop. Sedgman would agree: “Part of what’s changed since lockdown is an increased tendency to be abusive towards front of house staff, and keeping them safe is the priority,” she said. (In this piece published yesterday, Rachael Healy hears from staff members and stand-ups who find themselves at the sharp end of alcohol-induced trouble, facing everything from mass brawls to urination and mid-show copulation.)
Some of the recent upsurge in audience trouble appears to be concentrated on “jukebox musicals” and in shows with a celebrity star, which leads some traditionalists to bemoan the behaviour of those attracted to those shows. But this seems to miss an obvious feature of incidents like the one at The Bodyguard: it’s exactly this audience, most of whom are listening quietly, whose experience is being ruined – and when the disruptive theatregoers are removed, everyone else cheers. Nor is there any evidence that more than one person took nude photographs of James Norton during A Little Life.
In any case, you can see that there’s something confusing in how “jukebox musicals” are marketed: in February, Ambassador Theatre Group said that it would work with producers to tone down ads that pitch shows as “the best party in town” or say that audiences are “dancing in the aisles”. In that context, we might feel quite differently about the Bodyguard audience member who it is claimed was asked to leave for “[putting] his arms in the air”.
“Some venues have been quite hypocritical,” Sedgman said. “If you’ve paid a lot of money on the basis of that sort of ad and you get a free bottle of prosecco, it can be a jolt to see signs telling you that you can’t sing along.”
As complicated as all of this is, the best way to resolve the problem appears to be dealing with it before it happens. “The conversations I’ve had with venues for nearly a decade are about expectation management,” Sedgman said. “You can’t prime people for one sort of experience and then expect front of house staff to de-escalate it when it goes wrong. It’s about helping people make informed decisions, and pick the experience that’s right for them.”
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Why this matters outside the theatre
If you don’t go to the theatre, all of this may seem roughly as consequential as a group of noisy teenagers being escorted out of the local Odeon. But Sedgman argues differently – and her work is premised on the idea that the sort of tensions we see in any kind of audience tell us something larger.
“The theatre really is a laboratory space for figuring out this stuff,” she said. “It’s always been the case that vast societal frustrations and differences in expectations bubble up in live performance and then come through elsewhere. So I think it’s important not only if you’re interested in theatre – but in figuring out what it means to be together in every aspect of our lives.”
What else we’ve been reading
A long weekend spent with children off school/family/your own company is bound to leave most of us with some unwanted emotional baggage to unload – look no further than Lizzie Cernik’s 20 tips for a mental health spring clean. Toby Moses, head of newsletters
Simon Hattenstone interviews Tom Turcich, who decided to walk around the world in response to the death of a close friend at the age of 17 and finally finished 18 years later. “Every day I woke up with a purpose,” he says. “Then I’d lie in bed, thinking: ‘That was a good day, mission accomplished, let’s do it again tomorrow.’” Archie
Here’s something you might have missed – Pitchfork’s look at the cursed history of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines; a pop-song that a decade on somehow manages to define all that was wrong with the noughties, while corrupting everything it touches (apart from Pharrell, apparently). Toby
For two decades as head of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, Geoff Knupfer was tasked with finding the bodies of those killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Rory Carroll meets him, and some of those still hoping to lay their loved ones to rest. Archie
How much does AI know about you? How many pirated books has it learned from? And what recourse is there if it decides, for example, to falsely accuse you of sexual harassment? The thorny data privacy issues surrounding generative AI like ChatGPT are unpacked by Alex Hern and Dan Milmo. Toby
Sport
Football | A 96th-minute penalty save from Ben Foster (above) secured a 3-2 victory for Wrexham against Notts County, their closest rival for automatic promotion from the National League. The dramatic save from Foster, the former Premier League goalkeeper who came out of retirement to join Wrexham last month, left Phil Parkinson’s side three points clear at the top of the league.
Football | England’s historic success at the European Championship last summer has had little impact on inner-city teenage girls with 63% unable to name any of the Lionesses, according to new research. The report also found that one in four teenage girls still never watch women’s football and only 17% are part of a club.
Golf | After Jon Rahm’s victory at the Masters, Andy Bull writes that another disappointing showing from Rory McIlroy means “you have to wonder if he is ever going to get what he wants from this tournament … At this point, it is beginning to feel pathological. He seems to have lost the tournament every which way a man can”.
The front pages
“Junior doctor strikes could run until general election” says our Guardian front page this morning. “Thousands more patients than expected won’t be treated due to doctors’ strike” – that’s the i, while the Daily Express offers “Don’t get ill! Doctors’ strike ‘going to hurt’”. “NHS strike will cause a month of disruption” says the Times. “We save lives for £14 an hour” – the Daily Mirror says this is the “truth of junior medics’ poor pay as Tories refuse to start talks”.
The Daily Telegraph’s lead today is “Biden will push to unite all Stormont parties” – the US president is on his way there – while the Daily Mail has “19 terror suspects among channel arrivals”. The top story in the Financial Times is “First batch of IPOs under streamlined China listings rules soar 96% on debut”. “Queen: send Wills and Harry to War” – that’s the “royal secret revealed”, says the Sun, in an ITV documentary, adding “Monarch wanted BOTH to fight” in Afghanistan.
Today in Focus
The ‘nice, ordinary’ family suspected of being deep-state Russian spies
When a couple and their children moved into a sleepy suburb of Slovenia’s capital, their neighbours thought they were very normal. But were they really who they seemed?
Cartoon of the day | Ben Chilton
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Blue cheese negroni, anyone? Viral cocktails infused or topped with cheese are all the rage, writes Tim Dowling, who has tried out some truly unexpected drink combinations in the name of journalism.
While the aforementioned negroni “tastes like a compostable food waste sack on the night before bin day”, Dowling had more success with a Burrata Breakfast Martini, made with the liquid that the cheese comes in. “The burrata water actually does give the drink the foamy head the recipe predicted,” he writes. “And the best thing I can say about burrata water is that it’s mostly inoffensive … my only criticism would be that the burrata martini really doesn’t seem like a breakfast drink. But it isn’t bad. After a first, cautious sip I think: I could actually finish this. After another sip, I do.”
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Bored at work?
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