Wednesday, January 03, 2024
Obsession with ‘theatre etiquette’ could soon turn audiences away
The Independent: In her final essay collection before her death, I Remember Nothing, Nora Ephron included a list entitled “What I won’t miss”. On it, she included “email” – twice. “I know I already said it, but I want to emphasise it,” she wrote. Because you can never get on top of emails, and you can never get away from them. Just ask Andrew Scott, who revealed this week that he had to stop doing the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet because a man was sitting in the audience, answering his emails.
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6 comments:
Wow… I do not know what to think about this. This article stopped me dead in my tracks and really forced me to think. Before reading this my opinion has always been theatre etiquette is necessary when going to a live performance. And I have always believed that if you do not respect theatre etiquette you are not showing respect to the performance being watched. However, I think there was a lot of truth to this article and a perspective I have never thought about. I am someone who often gets shushed during a performance as excitedly whispering something to the person next to me or loudly cheering during a dance break. I think there is a balance to it all. And I do think that if we as a theatre community continue to tighten the expectation for theatre etiquette we will turn a lot of people off. The theatre community is supposed to be a welcoming palace that allows for freedom of expression and creativity. I hope that the next time I see someone excitedly mouth the words to their favorite song during a show I do not judge them but instead appreciate their enthusiasm and their love for something I also love so very much.
Last fall, I attended a production of Cabaret on the West End. As soon as I sat down, the older gentleman sitting next to me whispered, “I did Cabaret in high school.” That night, I not only heard leading lady Rebecca Louise Taylor’s rendition of Maybe This Time, but also the 60-year-old Welshman’s sitting to my right as he harmonized his self-composed baritone line simultaneously. This experience made me believe in theater etiquette. This article brings up so many good points. Theatre is a relationship between audience and performers and reciprocal respect must exist. Additionally, respect for other audience members is so important, as commercial theatre tickets aren’t cheap. The only part of this article I didn’t agree with was the encouragement for actors to take a stand on etiquette mid-performance. While I understand they feel disrespected, house management and ushers are trained to deal with these situations. Too many times, have actors accidentally called out someone using an accessibility aid, confusing it for a cell phone. Having house management trained for this promotes both etiquette and accessibility.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this article’s viewpoint. My first thought is that I disagree and that we absolutely need to enforce theater etiquette. I have recently been seeing people attending shows in sweatshirts and sweatpants and I’m frankly a bit offended. I was always taught that the theater is a big event and it is only respectful to dress up in your best. People put so much time and effort and love into their work in the theater and the least you can do is put on some nice clothes. This article also brought up points of people on their phones during shows or talking or something of that sort. I frankly think that’s also abhorrent. Basic respect of the actors performing for you should be a minimum. All that being said, I think that the author has a point about how audience participation is discouraged in high brow productions. I love shows where the audience is involved and cheering for the heroes and booing the villains. I think that should definitely be more normalized, however I don't think that an audience being involved in a play is “poor etiquette.”
This was a very interesting article. I am a person that always was a person of rule and guidelines and that was no different when it came to theatre etiquette. I always wanted everyone to be respectful of the performance currently happening for the sake of the performers and the crew and the entire creative team that spent who knows how long making sure everything was perfect to give you the audience member the best experience possible and you sitting there on your phone was not showing and acknowledgment of the work put in. However, I feel like this article does bring up some excellent points of theatre needing to be a less pretentious place for people to come and experience the joys of live performance, like we do. Overall, I have a slightly different view of theatre etiquette now after reading this article and I am appreciative for it.
I think theatre etiquette or behavior is quite simple, don't do anything that would lessen the experience for those around you. That should pretty much cover what most people get annoyed by. I think this also disregards some of the "rules" that some people think exist, at least to me, you can disagree if you want. The major thing it ignores is the idea that you have to dress up for theatre, which I think is completely antithetical to what theatre ideally is. Theatre is an art form for the people, while it is sometimes touted as this high art form, I am of the persuasion that art as a whole should be for the masses and shouldn't be locked behind some gate. That is exactly what the "you should dress up for theatre" argument does, and it alienates newcomers to the art form which is detrimental in the long run. For any kind of show whether it be theatre, opera, or classical musical concerts, there shouldn't be this onus to dress up. If you want to you can, however, I and many others will be showing up in pants and a sweatshirt as that is what's comfortable to wear when sitting in a seat for 3 hours.
I do think that this is a very interesting conversation, and one that doesn’t have clear answers. I personally feel that theatre etiquette is extremely important, and something that more people post-pandemic have been worse at following. To me it is simple things such as staying quiet during the performance, keeping devices silenced, etc. People pay a lot of money to see these productions be performed by professionals who have trained their whole lives to do so, not by the old man sitting behind you, or hearing the person who couldn’t leave the room to text someone. How audience members should behave in theater is very different than in concerts (though in some instances I wish concert audiences were a bit more like theater goers). But, as someone with a diabetic mother who can’t silence their blood sugar monitor (which sounds an awful lot like a cellphone ding), I think it is important for actors to not make assumptions. You see a lot of articles now about actors on stage stopping a performance mistaking a medical device in the audience as a cell phone.
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