They say that you can tell a person’s character by how they are towards animals. I don’t know about that but you certainly can tell something from how people behave towards children and young people.
As a company, we have played a lot of theatres and generally, I take people as I find them. When you go to perform at a theatre on a Sunday you can meet two very different kinds of people who work there.
The first type begrudges you walking in. You’d think they owned the place and often it’s a case of no you can’t do that. Why? Because you can’t! You can see them thinking, “Ughh I’ve got this bunch of kids all day, what are they going to get up to? What do they know, I bet their leaders are jumped up nobodies who know nothing. Heaven save me.” Never mind that they are getting paid double because it’s Sunday, they seem to carry negativity around with them. Everything you ask for is like asking for the moon. They’d simply prefer not to be there.
I always found the best way to deal with this type was to continue to be polite and not rise to meet their annoyance– be very professional in fact. Quite often they brighten up later in the day as they realise what the students can do. When they realise that the performers care about what they are doing, are polite and put a lot of energy into their performance but little into showing off or being silly. They gradually became more and more supportive until come the performance these moody theatre people are rooting for the show and making helpful suggestions to add something more. I hate to say it but many of these kinds of theatre technicians seem to work in local or regional theatres where they have some kind of power over you and they enjoy exploiting it.
Once at Manchester Palace Theatre, I decided that enough was enough and complained. It didn’t help us though because at the end of the show when Robert had sent off all the performers to huge applause, they lowered the curtain so slowly that you could have made a cup of tea and crumpets in the time it took to reach the floor. They got their revenge by making us look unprofessional.
The second type loves you being there. They already know it’s not about them but the kids and they are unfailingly interested in what is happening and want to know what they can do to make it special. Nothing is ever a problem and they just enjoy what they do. All the West End theatres fall into this category. I once told one of the technicians at Drury Lane how hard it could be for us in some theatres and how great it was in the West End. He said, “We have the same show night after night and we know how it goes. This is different, this is a break, this is outside of what we do and what we love. And what’s more, this is our audience for the future. If we don’t look after them now, we won’t have an audience in the future.”
I know which type I prefer.
