Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre

Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre BAZ KERSHAW THE PROBLEM OF APPLAUSE Applause, apparently, is not what it used to be. In a recent brief report on firstnight West End audiences, Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian, noted a certain increased hyperactivity of response. For a couple of decades these audiences have often been known to applaud at the first entrance of the star actor (especially if she or he is elderly), at Shakespeare's soliloquies, and at the sets of modem musicals. Such outbursts surely indicate the audience's sense of itself as part of the occasion of the show. but it is the nature of the applause at the end of a perfonnance, implies Gardner, that may tell us most about the general health of the theatre: What is new is audiences' increasing fondness for the standing ovation. In the past two years, theatre-goers have become more detennined than ever to make their stand. [..,] Returning the favour, actors themselves are increasingly prone to applauding their audiences. This suggests a disturbing lack of confidence in both the play and their own abilities - as if they are astonished that we are there at all. (4) Of course, there is a methodologicaL debate to be had about the value of such information in the making of generalizations about the theatre in any particular period. Is the first-night audience, as Gardner argues, "an entirely different breed from nonnal theatre-goers" (4), or is it the theatrical equivalent of litmus paper, a reliable indicator of the cultural toxicity of the event in its whole environment; or are its reactions so fickle and fleeting that generally they are best ignored by theatre scholars, or at least relegated to the odd footnote in histories of the art? And if such uncertainty attaches to the generality of audience response, what hope is there of making any useful sense of applause itself? Yet Gardner's perception of a sea change in late twentieth-century Modern Drama, 42:2 (2001) 133 134 BAZ KERSHAW audience behaviour, even if only in the refined arena of the first-night aristocracy of London's commercial theatre, prompts me to think that the range and styles of theatrical applause may be worth dwelling on, for the same kinds of reasons that a geneticist, say, may pay attention to a protein that seems marginal : might this matter be an index to the health, or the disease, of a whole culture? So, to put the larger methodological issue addressed by this article into a nutshell query, In what ways can theatre, and particularly its politics, be better understood through thinking of its applause? The verb "applaud" entered the English language in 1536, just forty years before James Burbage built the first Theatre in Shoreditch, but it took another twenty years or so after that monumental event for the noun."applause" itself to be coined ("Applaud," "Applause"). Both words are from the Latin (applaudere, applausus), so it comes as no surprise that the playwright who was especially proud of his classical learning should be moved to exclaim "The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage" (qtd. in Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 85). Hence Ben Jonson early recognized that applause and the English theatre were coterminous, that applause defines theatre in much the same way that waves define the shore. It is a curiosity of contemporary scholarship, then, that standard reference works such as The Oxford Companion to the Theatre and The Cambridge Guide to Theatre carry informative entries about Appia or Shaw's The Apple Cart, about Apollodorus or the apron stage, but devote no space at all to applause. Even more remarkably, the same is true of recent studies of audiences in theatre and perfonnance by, for example, Susan Bennett, Herbert Blau, Jill Dolan, Nicholas Abercrombie, and Brian Longhurst, none of which lists applause in their indexes nor treats it as a distinct topic. So the scholarly silence surrounding applause is, as they say, deafening. But what might such silence, such lack of interest in a crucially defining feature of Western theatre, signify? Or, to tum the question on its head, why do theatre scholars...