Good morning. The next time you go to a play, you may find that the most shocking scenes are taking place off stage. That, at least, is the pattern in a spate of recent dramas in the stalls across Britain: from stories about an usher being punched after asking rowdy audience members to tone it down in Edinburgh to a heckler barracking a child actor at the Royal Opera House and illicit nude photos being taken of James Norton in the West End, there are multiplying worries that the traditional hush of the theatre is under threat.
On Good Friday, a performance of the Bodyguard in Manchester was stopped and police were called to deal with two audience members who insisted on tunelessly singing along to I Will Always Love You while everyone else tried to listen. One measure of the strength of feeling: the furious reception for TV presenter Alison Hammond’s prior suggestion that she would be skipping the show as a result of the theatre’s approach to audience participation, and her subsequent grovelling apology. The stage is meant to arouse our passions, but not, surely, like this.
