A couple of weeks ago, I talked about an uncomfortable seat and a play without an interval, which led me to leave and watch in the bar. I didn’t expect to encounter an audience problem in my next visit to the theatre.
I went to Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, the playwright who died in November. It’s said to be his best play, so I was keen to see it. Back in the 80s, he donated some money to my youth theatre to help us host a group of Czech young people, so I knew he was a generous man, and I love his script for the film Shakespeare in Love.
It was performed at the Old Vic Theatre, a fine old London theatre with a long history: it was built in 1818. To stage it, they had taken out the stalls seats and built a circular stage that even had a revolve. Then they built two banks of seats on the stage. It was cleverly done, and the audience surrounded the action.
It’s a dazzling play that sometimes makes your brain hurt as it has so many ideas. It’s really about love in all its forms, and like any play, it’s about people reacting to each other and to events. There were a lot of opposites at work. The play was set in the present and in the period 1809-12, when the theatre was built. Other opposites were order v chaos, classical v romantic, logic v emotion and so on – you had to work to keep up.
It was magical, funny, and it stayed in the head long after the performance ended. Unfortunately for me, something else stayed in my head – the American man in the next seat. From the first minute I discovered he not only had a very loud laugh, but he did so often. At first, it was annoying because it felt like he was getting the jokes and showing off. But as he kept doing it, I realised it was just how he was. The people in the row in front did that English thing of pointedly turning their heads to look at him, but of course, it had no effect.
It made me think how an audience is a little community, and they are all different. Let’s face some people are annoying. We sit there mainly in silence and somehow have to get on with each other. In the end, I coped with it by getting used to it, and as the evening went on, I grew to accept it. In Shakespeare in Love, there’s a great moment when a puritan starts shouting out at the stage because he thinks it’s disgusting for a woman to play the part of a woman. The audience, who in those days stood, dealt with him by pushing him away. These days, we are kinder, even though our patience can, at times, be stretched.
