Audiences Behaving Badly

by Martin Setchell
(Published by The Press, Christchurch, on
September 11, 2001)

"Please would you now ensure your cell-phones and other portable electronic devices are turned off as these may interfere with the performers' concentration and other people's enjoyment"

Could this become the pre-performance parallel to the airlines' pre-flight announcement? A similar request was made before Andras Schiff began his town hall piano recital here. No doubt the organisers had in mind the fact that the Hungarian virtuoso had stormed off the stage of the Usher Hall during his latest Edinburgh Festival performance in protest against audience noise intrusion.

As a regular performer and audience-member I have every sympathy with him. I can still vividly recall the shock to concentration when at the quietest moment of Debussy's Clair de Lune during one of my town hall organ concerts, a cellphone not only rang loudly, but its owner proceeded to answer it and indulge in audible conversation. It's so bad in the cellular jungle of Hong Kong that performance venues, libraries, and hospitals are considering installing mobile-phone jamming systems.

Forgetting to turn off cellphones, pagers, and beeping watches is the most recent additions to a long-established catalogue of audience bad behaviour. Today's audiences are certainly more civilised than, for example, their 18th century counterparts in Italian opera houses who thought nothing of eating, drinking, card-playing, and even brawling during a performance. Haydn reputedly inserted the sudden loud chord in the soft slow movement of his Surprise symphony to discourage the female members of his audience from dozing off, and probably snoring.

But other irritants abound. Coughing, throat-clearing, sneezing, and nose-blowing can get so chronic that many a performance should be retitled 'The Coughing Cantata' or 'The Sound of Mucus'. No longer do patrons really try to hold that niggling excretion until the end of a movement or a natural break in the dialogue. That first cough always elicits an echo chorus of sympathy. Are these people genuinely suffering uncontrollable muscular reactions? If so, perhaps they should consider not attending in the first place. Are they expressing boredom, or disapproval of the performance? Do they have an egocentric desire to draw attention to themselves? Performance venues are responding imaginatively in case more ardent listeners decide to give live performances a miss, and the coughers end up affecting the coffers. At Birmingham's Symphony Hall, for example, patrons have been issued with free cough-lozenges since 1993. Fortunately they have waxed wrappers, (the sweets, that is) because that crinkle-crackle of paper is another common interruption.

Casual conversation during live performance is totally unforgivable. If you're spellbound by maestro X the last thing you want to hear is "Don't you think he's looking older, dear?" (not even in a stage-whisper) from Aunt Daisy in the row behind. When a New York theatre-goer chided his neighbour for it, her husband, seated alongside, counter-attacked. Perhaps 'stage-rage' will be the inevitable successor of road-rage and air-rage?

I suggest there are reasons for modern audiences behaving badly in theatres, concert-halls, and opera houses. TV, CD and now DVD represent marvellous technology, but because they carry on regardless while we eat or talk, we forget that live performers can't do the same. Open-air concerts provide great entertainment for the masses, but do people unwittingly transfer their conventions to the indoor venue? The aural wall-paper of musack everywhere from lift, to shopping-mall, to answerphone encourages the concept of music as 'aural wallpaper' meant as a pleasant background to something more important, rather than art needing 100 per cent concentration. Perhaps we have become so conscious of our rights as individuals that we are forgetting our communal responsibilities.

Think about it: when did you last hear the musicians or the actors cough or stop to answer their cellphone?

And don't say Mimi coughing in La Boheme.

~ Martin Setchell ~