Audience as Performer: The Changing role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century by Caroline Heim, and: Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales by Kirsty Sedgman (review)

Although theatre and performance scholars often ask questions about contemporary audiences, only rarely do they ask questions of them. Turning to the questionnaire and the personal interview, Caroline Heim and Kirsty Sedgman argue in their respective studies that audiences have valuable things to say.

In Audience as Performer, Heim's central historical claim—that only in the twenty-first century are mainstream theatre audiences returning to the demonstrative performativity of their nineteenth-century forebears—appeals insofar as it showcases how the more kinesthetically liberated behaviors of television viewers, rock-concert attendees, and immersive fringe-event participants recently have been taken up by Broadway and West End audiences. (Heim's mainstream is a broad church and further includes the off-Broadway Signature Theatre, Chicago's Steppenwolf, and Shakespeare's Globe in London, among others.) Technology also plays a key role in constraining or enabling audiences, from the electric lights that disciplined theatregoers into quiet submission a century ago to the iPhone that unlocks a whole new repertoire of actions today. Twenty-first-century audiences largely refrain from throwing peanuts and custards, even as with increasing enthusiasm they don Jersey Boys T-shirts, tweet from their seats at the Godspell revival, and join actors onstage in Once and Testament of Mary.

Heim's early chapters set the stage for her argument that the performing audiences of today have rediscovered a lost tradition. Building on the methods of theatre historians like Jane Goodall and Lawrence Levine, she mines eyewitness accounts of expressive audiences recorded by playgoers, actors, and theatre managers along with late-nineteenthcentury etiquette manuals that inveigh against applauding boisterously and singing along. Whether or not you agree that the phenomena of audiences acting as critic, community, consumer, and co-creator (Heim's later chapter headings) actually disappeared during the twentieth century, audiences undeniably broadcast their views more extensively today than in previous eras. As Heim notes, a 2013 Ticketmaster survey reports that a striking one-infour UK theatregoers will tweet about a performance after they have seen it, and one-in-five will write a review on social media. More crucially, the responses generated by Heim's 106 interviews and sixty-two questionnaires indicate that audiences view their role in these terms. To be sure, different theatregoers want different things from different theatres, but more surprising is when audiences foreground the contradictory impulses in their own behavior, such as the Sydney theatregoer who reveals that her play-going group has agreed to write down their performance reactions, yet to keep those reactions in their pockets so as to avoid upsetting other members. As a documentation and celebration of audience behavior, this study is brilliantly engaging, from Beatles fans literalizing the phrase "juke-box musical" by calling out requests to the actors in Let It Be to the intrepid couple who in 2010 booked out private West End theatre boxes in order to have sex during shows.

Rather than speculate, as Baz Kershaw and Nicholas Ridout have, about the nature of audience applause, Heim's audiences tell her (and us) what gets them going. The responses cataloged here indicate that above all, mainstream audiences value their interactions with actors and their ability to comment on acting. In turn, Heim draws many perceptive comments about the changing nature of audiences from among the nineteen actors whom she also interviews. One Australian actor proposes not just that twenty-first-century audiences are more self-consciously responsive than earlier generations, but that their self-consciousness stems from exhibitionism rather than embarrassment. (The desire to take selfies and share one's theatre attendance on social media has upstaged last-century fears of looking foolish.) For all that Heim's book sets up a dichotomy between...