It’s high time we started awarding audiences with their own star ratings

Red faced: Will Gompertz

bbc

7 July 2023

Have you ever died? I have, and it’s not nice. It’s humiliating, shattering, confidence-draining and, yes, painful. Oh, and nobody talks to you afterwards, either. It is very isolating. I really wouldn’t recommend it.

It is a miserable fate that has befallen many in the world of entertainment. I’d hazard a guess that anyone who regularly performs in front of an audience will have experienced the hideous feeling of “dying” on stage. It is the grisly moment when you realise you haven’t simply ‘lost’ the room, but it has actively turned against you. This is the point at which you ‘die’, when an involuntary out-of-body phenomenon occurs where you leave your corporeal self and look down from above at the struggling you and wonder what will become of that poor soul below.

It is part of the tantalising and mysterious nature of live entertainment, which can be life-affirming for all participants when it goes well and precisely the opposite when it does not. It is this unpredictability that makes performing so scary; it is the root cause of the notorious ‘stage fright’. You can give exactly the same performance one night to rousing applause and the next to deafening silence. The only difference being the audience - the much overlooked fifth Beatle of great live art.

Those who gather to watch a show are its most crucial element. The audience bring liveness to life, as was so spookily apparent during the pandemic.

And yet the audience rarely gets a mention in reviews or credited in programmes. Maybe audiences should start to receive a star rating along with the performers. It would make explicit the creative role they play and overcome the passive mindset of “we’ve done our bit; we’ve bought the ticket and we’ve turned up. Now, it’s over to you, performers”.

I’m not suggesting or encouraging mindless heckling, or clapping unnecessarily, or delivering a running commentary (we have all sat next to that person), or in any way disrespecting the performers. I’m talking about being tuned-in and aware of the part you – the audience member – has to play. The best audiences are empathetic, entertaining and engaged, just like the one I witnessed a couple of weeks ago in New York.

I was on Broadway to see the fantastic Pulitzer Price-winning play Fat Ham, written by James Ijames. It is very funny, very clever, and very loosely based on Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The actors don’t so much break the fourth wall as totally dismantle it.

Ijames prefers not to talk about ‘the audience’, instead he uses the term ‘the crowd’ (Shakespeare called his stage-side audience ‘groundlings’), for whom he has devised space within the show that invites interaction and improvisation. The more confident members of the audience were quick to take up the challenge, with well-timed, pitch-perfect comments that were way smarter than the “he’s behind you!” call-and-response type of audience participation that is part and parcel of the slapstick panto season.

The Fat Ham audience were required to think and feel, to judge when to speak (a word or two at most) and when to stay silent. They weren’t just part of the show, they had a part in the show. Ijames was relying on his actors to set the tone and the audience to be sensitive and smart enough to react appropriately, which they did (it was a five-star performance by all).

Fat Ham is bold and inventive in many ways, not least with the subtle interweaving of Shakespeare’s original Hamlet plot with a contemporary story of the life of a queer, black, confused, twenty-something called Juicy, who is about to embark on an online course in Human Resources. Meanwhile, his mother has married his uncle whom Juicy suspects of murdering his father, whose ghost appeared from a dustbin in the yard to say as much. As I said, it riffs on Hamlet.

The motivation for Ijames to make the audience an active ingredient in his play was a desire to draw everybody into the same space of collective imagination by changing the formal relationships between the players and playgoers. It has worked brilliantly on Broadway, as it also did back in Elizabethan times when Shakespeare was plying his trade on the banks of the River Thames.

I hope Fat Ham comes to London and gives our wonderful British audiences the chance to take part. I back them to play their role with aplomb. If they don’t, the show will die horribly.

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