Bravo! Boo! Audience participation is no bad thing

What do Igor Stravinsky and Whitney Houston have in common? If you said, “A deep devotion to the Russian Orthodox church,” you’re way off. The real answer: both have precipitated riots in a theatre. Stravinsky’s occurred at the 1913 Paris premiere of his rhythmically shocking, explicitly-danced Rite of Spring and Houston’s 10 days ago at a Manchester performance of The Bodyguard, a jukebox musical based on her songs.

One video recorded by an audience member shows star Melody Thornton barely embarking on the soft first rendition of “And Iiiiiiiii” from “I Will Always Love You” before someone else pitches in with a caterwauling accompaniment. Several other ticket-holders are heard joining in, albeit a little more softly and tunefully. Boos and shouts ring out.

The show was stopped and two audience members bodily ejected. The police arrived soon after. But there is nothing new about this kind of audience participation — in fact, several hundred people sitting in reverent, attentive silence for two hours, as you might see at Carnegie Hall or the National Theatre today, are the historical exception, not the rule. Fans have been making their feelings known during shows for millennia — and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Aristotle in his Poetics described the audience of a Greek tragedy in the fourth century BC “making a fuss” about some crass stage action, while theatregoers in the age of Shakespeare clapped and booed — even attacking the fixtures and fittings when displeased. Beethoven’s seventh symphony proved so popular at its premiere that the audience immediately demanded an encore of the dance-like second movement. These are all, justified or not, examples of theatre criticism in action, only the power is with the people, rather than a professional class of reviewers.

It was the domineering Richard Wagner, of course, who decided he’d had enough of hearing from the stalls; when he built his opera house at Bayreuth, he had the lights dimmed during performances so the audience wouldn’t distract each other. In fairness, if you’d written Parsifal you’d also want the audience to shush. But this attitude — that the work of art is holy — has persisted. At some classical concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall, the programme notes request: “Please do not turn the page until the song and its accompaniment have ended.”

The argument that this respects the performers and the work is strong; it grinds my gears when audiences at the Metropolitan Opera in New York applaud before the orchestra has finished. But as Kirsty Sedgman, an academic who studies audiences, writes, such rigid “behaviour policing” is a means of “keeping the masses docile, deferent and in their place”. Just think of the power of the tut, for example, if someone claps between movements of a symphony: more than a request for silence, it carries a message of social disapproval. “You, the tuttee, do not understand the rules here.”

There is no reason those rules should never change. I myself, courting controversy, have spontaneously applauded between movements when stirred by the music. Were I the composer, I might be gratified. Much of what we think of as respect for art is simply ossified custom.

Most disturbances have been in the service of honest criticism or, as in the case of The Bodyguard, selfish satisfaction; it is examples of audience participation in the service of art that are rare. Perhaps the happiest exception came in 2021, when soprano Lisette Oropesa was performing, solo, an aria from Verdi’s La traviata which normally has a tenor part. As Oropesa paused to hear her non-existent lover, student tenor Liu Jianwei supplied the notes from the back of the hall, charming the singer and his fellow fans.

The lesson? If you’re going to interrupt Whitney, you’d better sound like Whitney.

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