Do manners maketh the musical? Thinking about theatre etiquette

Tuesday, August 07, 2018


An edited version of this article originally appeared on Miro Magazine.  

Earlier this year, London’s Coliseum caused a bit of a stir. Midway through previews of the musical Chess, it was announced that audience members were no longer allowed to bring in food and drink to the theatre, after staff realised that water bottles were being filled with gin and vodka, resulting in “rowdy” behaviour. A few weeks later, a theatre critic got into hot water on Twitter after commenting that checking your phone during a show was perfectly acceptable, seen by many in the industry as legitimising bad manners. These two instances represent the very tip of the behavioural iceberg that has luvvies worldwide shaking their heads and tutting loudly, because when it comes to theatre etiquette, things clearly ain’t wot they used to be. According to a 2015 Whatsonstage survey, 85% of theatregoers believe that standards of behaviour have declined in recent years. The most frequently-cited complaints include the consumption of noisy snacks, the use of mobile phones, inappropriate clothing and drunk and disorderly behaviour. The internet is full of opinion pieces and angry statements about the actions of fellow theatregoers, and there is even an entire Twitter feed dedicated to complaining about it, on which fuming audience members can vent their rage at the bad manners of their peers.

It’s easy to disregard these complaints as aeriated bursts of self-righteousness from over-entitled luvvies, but they are not the only ones affected by such behaviour. With the price of tickets as they are (I recently paid £55 for an Upper Circle seat), a night in the West End is not something that many of us can afford to do regularly. Having a special evening tarnished by someone talking or eating noisily in the seat next to you is beyond irritating. Call it the ultimate first world problem, but surely the actors still have a right to complain. Mastering live performance is hard enough. Having to deal with the piercing blips and beeps from smartphones is an unnecessary addition. Some actors have complained about it and intervened (most recently Orlando Bloom) but most of them just get on with their jobs. They’re hardly going to go on strike. 

 In my opinion, behaviour in the theatre is about respect: for the actors, the audience and the art. It’s not the same as the cinema, or a night of Netflix: it is a unique, one-of-a-kind experience that will literally never be the same again. Actors and production teams spend weeks preparing for it, and audiences pay good money to go. It’s a public space, one that New York journalist Amanda Duarte described as a place in which “we enter a contract with the performers, each other, and ourselves[…]to create magic in the dark.” Ie. This is culture of the highest order, and it demands our silence and attention. Now, I’m all for championing the sanctity of the art, but I’m not naive enough to presume that just because I, a fortunate, well-educated, white theatre nerd feel this way, that everyone else does, too. The fact of the matter is that the world has changed, and art is changing with it. As rules of behaviour have relaxed elsewhere in society (take restaurant eating, for example), so too has the theatre. People have begun to treat it like any other form of public entertainment: it is not a sacred space.

Unfortunately, those who bang on about the need for strict theatre etiquette can easily be brushed off as reactionary elites, hanging onto some “golden age” of theatre in which drunkenness never existed, audience reactions were limited to the odd restrained chuckle and everyone wore their mink and gave the butler the night off. This unfortunately conflates the issue of behaviour with questions of class and accessibility. According to Exeunt Magazine Editor Alice Saville, even the term “etiquette” is problematic, with its echoes of finishing school and upper-class manners, suggesting that outbursts about its decline are “full of thinly veiled anti-working class prejudice”. This attitude is not much helped by Stage columnist West End Producer’s tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps misguided, scheme of distributing Theatre Prefect badges to purchasers of his new book, giving them “permission” to police bad behaviour in the auditorium. Woe betide anyone who unwraps a Starburst at lights-down, lest a hockey-stick-wielding Etonian round on you for dragging down society. And let’s be clear: being middle-aged, white and private-schooled does not automatically equate to good behaviour in the auditorium; we all know that abusers of the sacred code of theatre conduct come from all backgrounds.

In order to stamp out such behaviour, rules of etiquette are often rattled out by journalists, in the hope of keeping things “as they were”. The irony of this attitude is that theatre is not historically a restrained or quiet affair. Ancient Greek audiences were free to heckle a disappointing play, while crowds at the Globe in the 1600s would spend the performance shucking oysters, crunching on apples and soliciting for sex. The “timeless” standards of behaviour that are said to be declining are in fact a late Victorian invention. But still, the etiquette persists, with Duarte warning her peers that “[i]f your cellular device emits a sound or a beam of light, I will throw it in the Hudson[…]I don’t care if you’re an on-call surgeon.” The problem is that the reassertion of traditional etiquette doesn’t do much for the image of theatre: it makes it appear stuffy and stale, reserved for a certain type of person, doing little to encourage younger audiences from different backgrounds. Tom Briggs, Co-artistic Director of Flickbook Theatre, which works extensively in areas of low arts engagement in the East Midlands, says that even the presence of a staff member in a suit is enough to put young people off going to the theatre: “To them it’s a bouncer, someone trying to keep them out.” To kids from the estate, theatre isn’t aspirational, just alienating. A solution might be to relax the rules and lessen the restrictive atmosphere: “I’d be more than happy to relax rules about food and phones if it got them in the building,” Briggs says. If we do nothing, we risk rendering theatre obsolete for future generations.

But is the industry listening? Stage Editor Alistair Smith notes that “theatre is never going to win a battle against the wider movement towards a more relaxed, informal society” but says there is no obvious solution. Indeed, how can we shake things up without compromising on the value of the art? Some theatres in the US have launched “tweet seats”, in which patrons can spend the performance looking at their phones without disturbing anyone else. Another option would be to increase the number of relaxed performances, in which audiences can come and go freely from the auditorium and noise is permitted. These are halfway-houses, a way of bending the constrictions of a traditional theatrical environment around a modern, distracted audience. A more effective method might be to change the environment altogether.

Mark Rylance recently made the point that if a theatregoer is on their phone mid-show, the actors are not doing their jobs properly. I think Mr Rylance is perhaps a touch too forgiving of the 21st-century attitude to technology, but he certainly highlights the point that the way to keep a ticket-holder away from their smartphone is to thoroughly engross them in the story. I’m not suggesting that the way forward is to welcome such phone use, but that instead of wasting energy fighting a losing battle against technology, theatres should focus on what they do best: telling stories, delving into the corners of the human soul for the benefit of the audience. Rather than trying to constantly police audience behaviour, it might be more beneficial to direct our efforts towards connecting with that audience.

The proscenium arch transformed for The Jungle. Photo: Marc Brenner
Seated in the darkness, up to fifty feet away from the stage, it is not always easy for theatregoers to forget the real world: they are merely detached spectators. In immersive or promenade theatre, however, audiences become a living part of the action. It becomes much harder to think about your stomach or Instagram feed when there is a fully made-up clown/centurion/fairy looking you straight in the eye, or if you’re walking through a convincing haunted house, as ticket-holders did in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man. Speaking directly to your audience, not the black ether beyond the footlights, makes all the difference: actors at The Globe interact directly with the groundlings, riffing and joking around Shakespeare’s text. As such, the venue does not have a close, restrictive atmosphere and is that much more enjoyable for it. Audience members boo and hiss (recently I saw one woman at As You Like It yell “[y]ou go girl!” at Rosalind) and want to let the actors know they’re enjoying it. This by no means detracts from the power or solemnity of the story; if anything, it enhances it. 

Yes, the Globe is a unique setting, but it doesn’t mean traditional houses are instantly irrelevant: even just a minor change in layout can be hugely effective (take, for example, the innovative staging used for The Jungle at the Playhouse). It is, however, an incentive to think outside the black box and find new ways of telling stories. Make it so captivating that audiences are stunned into silence and forget the outside world and their social media feeds. This might just be a better alternative to shoving rules of etiquette down people’s throats, which will ultimately just push new audiences further away. If you break down the barrier between actor and audience and envelop them in the story, rules of etiquette become irrelevant; all that is left is wonder.

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