Why is entering, leaving and an interval so boring?

Mark Hollander, 4 October 2012

Four thoughts fed this title:
Attended by: Mark Hollander; Chris Thorpe; Iain Bloomfield; Alan Dix; Alex Chisolm; Phelim McDermott; Tessa Gordzeiko; Ruth (from the Blahs); an usher from York Theatre Royal; Nick Ahad; tim Wheeler; Joe Verent and a growing crowd that reached maybe 25 people
1) The Peter Boyden report that triggered the Theatre Review of 2001 (leading to an additional £25m into theatre) suggested that theatres need to be more like cinemas - that the experience should start from the moment you walk through the doors.
2) A rural touring company in North Yorkshire that creates the most fantastic dynamic with its audience before the show
3) The current taste for so called ‘immersive theatre’
4) The increasing trend towards ‘festival programming’ and ‘festival theatre’ Provocation: why is the experience around a show usually so tediuos?
Theatre is tidal - audiences come in waves and leave - ebb and flow but the building is void in between.
It is costly to animate the variety of spaces in different ways.
But theatres can't just sell product - they do need to offer a full experience as cinemas do.
How can venues sell the idea of the venue beyond the work on stage?
An example is Contact Theatre in manchester: people will readily go there for a night out and not see work. people who see work will come out to the bar and join the non- viewing members of the public. They exploit the whole building irrespective of what is 

The Everyman Cinema in Liverpool used to have a similar dynamic.
So it can be done!
Theatres are public spaces - owned by the community but the architecture of many of them conspires against a good audience experience. This is a challenge.
Last year the Transform programme at the West Yorkshire Playhouse physically changed the foyer and cafe spaces and this had a very positive impact on the dynamic - but id was hard to manage and maintain and had to be removed.
A recommendation was made to read Finn kenedy's piece titled: Advice for staff of a theatre dealing with non-traditional audiences. (much laughter at this title).
Light Night in Leeds last year was an example of an event that filtered people to the Playhouse even when there was no work on there. The public felt it was part of a broader experience.

If you open your doors to a broader cross section of the community and embrace this fully then how can you ensure the ‘correct’ behaviour of that audience in the show? “Venues should not moderate the audience's behaviour.” This comment brought conflicting views - on balance the feeling was that theatres need to be more sophisticated in their dialogue with audiences. They shouuld be clear that certain kinds of work need certain kinds of engagement but they should explore ways to do this without forcing or ‘moderating’ behaviour. The ‘contract’ starts as the audience enter and you can curate their experience and encourage them to beahve appropriately in whichever space they are in.

'Relaxed performances' enable attendance by people that might disturb others in a more regular performance - such as those that make involuntary noises. Some debate about whether this separation is necessary and appropriate? Can live performance cope with a greater variety of audience engagement? Are some shows too precious unnecessarily?

It would be great if at the end of some ENO performances the audiences was whooping and hollering and at the end of some schools performances the audiences was quiet and held. But this should be because of the ongoing dialogue and the shape of the work - not because they have been told to behave differently.

The mood of the discussion was that there are some hugely exciting areas of exploration here - that the way theatres talk to audiences at the booking stage, in the non-performance spaces, through staff and artist engagement and through the nature of the work has much further to go as an area of development. Theatre exists for that two way relationship between audiences and performer and we can be more confident and more experimental with our approach to this and continue to learn from one another.


a confident dialogue with audiences, audience behaviour, Non-performance spaces, boring venues