In 1962, for the first and I hope last time in my life, I created a brief sensation in the theatre. The playhouse was the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and the play was a touring production of Billy Liar, which Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall had adapted from Waterhouse’s novel and which I’d first seen in London the year before, soon after Tom Courtenay replaced Albert Finney in the starring role. It had made a big impression on me, perhaps the first play ever to do so, and when it turned up on our doorstep I insisted my parents went to see it, and also bought a pair of tickets for a school friend and myself to a Saturday matinee a few days later.
The parental excursion turned out not to be a success: my father was surprised and angered that Billy’s father swore so much, bloody-this and bloody-that; and though this hardly qualifies as “strong language” now, it sounded daring enough at the time. (An elderly friend of the family, a Northumbrian schoolmistress, had never forgiven George Bernard Shaw for Eliza Doolittle’s astonishing “Not bloody likely!” in Pygmalion.)
Possibly infected by the same daring spirit, when my friend and I attended the matinee we did something that neither of us had planned. The Lyceum in those days clung on to an old tradition and played the national anthem before every performance. A piano and a violin struck up and the audience got to its feet. “Let’s just sit,” my friend said. So we sat.
A man in the row behind said, “They must be Irish nationalists.” People turned round to look and turned back to whisper disparagingly among themselves. The anthem seemed to go on for ever, but at last it was over, the curtain went up and the play began. At the interval my friend suggested that we limped stiff-legged up the aisle to buy an ice-cream, to show that we had sat through the anthem for, as it were, medical reasons; so that people who had mistaken us for disloyal young Irishmen would discover that in fact we were Douglas Baders. But I don’t remember that we actually did limp. We hadn’t the courage to be situationists. Normal service as an obedient member of the audience was quickly resumed, and the next time we went to see a film we stood as usual through the anthem at the end of the show, disrespectfully putting an arm into our coat-sleeves rather than coming to full attention as the union flag fluttered onscreen.
Like most people of my postwar generation, I learned to belong to an audience on weekly trips to the cinema. Saturday morning shows for children permitted a degree of turbulence in the front stalls, where the squealing grew loud at the violent knockabout of the Three Stooges, and orange peel could be thrown at one’s enemies. But long before adolescence these bad habits fell away, to be replaced by a respect for what we saw, that ran from the adverts to the main feature via the trailers, the Movietone newsreel, and Edgar Lustgarten telling stories from the files of Scotland Yard. There was no applause – why would you applaud an image? Today when clapping happens in art cinemas at the end of much-loved old films (It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca), it often dies quickly, as though people have suddenly awoken to the fact that the flesh-and-blood versions of James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart haven’t really been walking among them.
The cinema is a spell – the theatre too, to a lesser extent. It happens in the dark. The real world outside the hall recedes with the dimming of the lights. Nothing must break the conspiracy between film and audience, which means that, if laughter is appropriate, the ideal audience laughs when you laugh, and at much the same volume and length, but keeps quiet the rest of the time. Other reactions are of course permissible – tears, shock – but their great virtue is their silent expression. The well-known enemies of enjoyment are the rustling sweet wrapper, the crunching crisp packet, the hissing drinks can, the chatty couple, the voluble drunk.
I can see that there’s something both tyrannical and puritanical to these conventions, but as a subscriber to them I have to wonder how I (and I imagine many others) would have reacted during two recent and widely reported incidents. In the first, a 25-year-old artist and animator, Tamsin Parker, was forcibly removed from a screening at the British Film Institute for laughing too loudly during Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. According to another cinemagoer, she had been “dragged out shouting, ‘I’m sorry, I have Asperger’s!’”
According to her mother, this was her favourite film and her outing to the BFI with two friends had been a birthday treat that had ended in distress and “floods of tears”. According to the BFI, its staff had faced a “challenging and complex situation”, which may be true, because while some of the audience applauded her removal and one man (also evicted) called her “a bitch”, others left the cinema in apparent disgust at her treatment.
The second incident occurred at the Swan theatre, Worcester, during a matinee of Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale-based musical Into the Woods, after a woman began to “shush” another audience member, 25-year-old Harry Boniface, whose father, Martin, was acting in the production. The senior Boniface described his son as “non-verbal” with “profound and multiple” learning difficulties. He was making animal noises – the musical includes a cow and a wolf – and left with his support worker when the shushing woman in the audience eventually asked him to go.
The BFI is contrite, promising to look at “additional provisions and staff training” to accommodate “all the needs of our customers”. The Swan theatre was disappointed that “in these changing times … a member of the audience should take such an unenlightened view”. Martin Boniface said he would “love for people to be more tolerant and more accepting”, and who also would not hope for that? Better staff training, more public awareness and kindness, more autism-friendly screenings and performances of the kind proposed by the National Autistic Society. These things are a remedy of sorts, but in the end the great immovable is the selfish demand of the audience to hear and see a film, a play or a concert without the intrusion of the imperfect world they have temporarily left behind.
One of the best scenes in Ruben Östlund’s satire The Square, which won last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, shows an American conceptual artist and his Scandinavian interlocutor having a laboured and reverential conversation in front of a polite audience of well-to-do Swedes. Some unintelligible shouting interrupts the American when he is describing his mission to explore how the “space in a gallery relates to the space inside one’s own head”. It’s a man with Tourette’s, and eventually he makes himself clear. “Garbage,” he says, the implication being that he sees through the nonsense that has fooled everyone else.
Now imagine a similar scene in a concert hall – say the Wigmore in London. The audience has paid £60 each to hear the chamber music of Schubert. Someone in the hall begins to show the symptoms of Tourette’s. Unlike the man in Östlund’s film, he has no role as a truth-teller or idiot savant. The audience already knows the truth about Schubert. What is to be done?
• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
