Kay Town
Andrew Kay reflects on the concept of suspended belief and the nature of audiences
Curmudgeonly has long been my favourite word and one that I planned to grow into gracefully. Not that I like the idea of being seen as a bit of a grump, but it does denote a certain character.
But after a recent night at the theatre I went off the idea of being a curmudgeon completely. It was at the new show Svengali with mind boggler Derren Brown. Everything about the show, despite an initial technical hitch, was superb, from a brilliant set to his stunning tricks.
I think it is important to refer to them as tricks because if you don’t then you have to start questioning a whole load of stuff that you always thought was impossible.
“I don’t give a tinker’s cuss if the gentleman thought it was all a trick”
Anyway, I digress as usual. Sat behind me was the worst kind of audience member you can imagine. Now I know that I have moaned about children who are allowed to chatter and roam about in the theatre, about students who text throughout a play and with sweetie wrapper rustlers and drink slurpers and ladies with beehive hair-dos that obscure the view… god, I am a curmudgeon already.
On this occasion my gripe was with a senior gentlemen who huffed and puffed his way through the three hour show, commenting on each trick as it happened and declaring it all to be a load of hooey, baloney and other such terms of dismissal.
I don’t give a tinker’s cuss if the gentleman thought it was all a trick, I think Mr D Brown would freely admit that his art is in trickery. I simply didn’t need to hear him vocalise his dissent in audible whispers from start to finish. He seemed hell-bent on not having a good time, which when tickets cost £29 seems a rather profligate waste of his pension.
It seems that we continue to lose our ability to be audience members. And it’s not just the young, who I freely admit are savagely influenced by the stop/start/rewind and pause nature of so much entertainment that is technology based and comes with a remote control. On this occasion I would have paid good money for a remote control with a button that said mute but worked on audience members who thought their opinion was far more interesting than the show they had paid to see.
