Theatre Audiences

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Show the audience a flag to die for, or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to maintain against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as ancient as the human race. Few are the plays that can succeed without the moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions. These themes do not require that the audience shall think.

But for the speculative, the original, the new, the crowd evinces little favor. If the dramatist holds ideas of religion, or of politics, or of social law, that are in advance of his time, he must keep them to himself or else his plays will fail. Nimble wits, like Mr. Shaw , who scorn tradition, can attain a popular success only through the crowd's inherent love of fads; they cannot long succeed when they run counter to inherited ideas.

Their views of religion, of morality, of politics, of law, have been the views of the populace, nothing more. They never raise questions that cannot quickly be answered by the crowd, through the instinct of inherited experience. No mind was ever, in the philosophic sense, more commonplace than that of Shakespeare. He had no new ideas. He was never radical, and seldom even progressive. He was a careful money-making business man, fond of food and drink and out-of-doors and laughter, a patriot, a lover, and a gentleman.

Greatly did he know things about people; greatly, also, could he write. But he accepted the religion, the politics, and the social ethics of his time, without ever bothering to wonder if these things might be improved. The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn tradition and discover new ideas, have had minds far different from this. They have not written plays. It is to these men--the philosopher, the essayist, the novelist, the lyric poet--that each of us turns for what is new in thought.

But from the dramatist the crowd desires only the old, old thought. It has no patience for consideration; it will listen only to what it knows already. If, therefore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound, let him set it forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat it with a story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the individual mind.

Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre. This point is admirably illustrated by The Witching Hour , by Augustus Thomas , and The Servant in the House , by Charles Rann Kennedy, both of which were praised by many critics for their "novelty"; but to me one of the most significant and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real respect, novel in the least. Consider for a moment the deliberate and careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr.

Thomas so skilfully set forth.

Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering about and thinking during the last few years. The timeliness of the play lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations of the same materials.

Thomas has himself explained, in certain semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this play--on which his mind had been set for many years--until the general public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to set forth.

Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would undoubtedly have failed. When it was produced, it was not novel, but resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded. For one of the surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning any subject of importance. The dramatist should be the catholic collector and wise interpreter of those ideas which the crowd, in its conservatism, feels already to be safely true.

And if The Servant in the House will--as I believe--outlive The Witching Hour , it will be mainly because, in the author's theme and his ideas, it is older by many, many centuries. The theme of Mr. Thomas's play--namely, that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some extent the power of action--is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is at least recent in the history of thinking. It is a theme which dates itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose interest for the next. Kennedy's theme--namely, that when discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them--is at least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs to future generations as well as to the present.

Thomas has been skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr. Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason why The Servant in the House struck so many critics as being strange and new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

Modern Drama

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable. I know that the best European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of the theatre. They are striving to say in the drama what might be said better in the essay or the novel. As the exposition of a theory, Mr.

Shaw's Man and Superman is not nearly so effective as the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas. The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured individual and not by the uncultured crowd. That is why the breadth of his appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art.

Only his more commonplace plays -- A Doll's House , for example -- have attained a wide success.

And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than material reasons. Surely it is a good thing for the public that Hamlet never fails. The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays.

It is the lesser men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with innovations. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser men had made the crowd familiar with. He did the old thing better than the other men had done it--that is all. Yet this is greatly to Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed in the greatest drama.

In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his sanity. He is so greatly usual that he can understand all men and sympathize with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom from the general mind of man.

And it is largely because of this that he represents ever the ideal of the dramatist. He who would write for the theatre must not despise the crowd. All of the above-mentioned characteristics of theatre audiences, their instinct for contention and for partisanship, their credulity, their sensuousness, their susceptibility to emotional contagion, their incapacity for original thought, their conservatism, and their love of the commonplace, appear in every sort of crowd, as Mr.

Le Bon has proved with ample illustration. It remains for us to notice certain traits in which theatre audiences differ from other kinds of crowds. In the first place, a theatre audience is composed of individuals more heterogeneous than those that make up a political, or social, or sporting, or religious convocation. The crowd at a football game, at a church, at a social or political convention, is by its very purpose selective of its elements: But a theatre audience is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the old and the young, the native and the naturalized.

The same play, therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine his message to any single caste of society. In the same single work of art he must incorporate elements that will interest all classes of humankind. Those promising dramatic movements that have confined their appeal to a certain single stratum of society have failed ever, because of this, to achieve the highest excellence.

The trouble with Roman comedy is that it was written for an audience composed chiefly of freedmen and slaves. The patrician caste of Rome walked wide of the theatres. Only the dregs of society gathered to applaud the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Hence the over-simplicity of their prologues, and there tedious repetition of the obvious.

Hence, also, their vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity. Here was find dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste of society--the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its over-niceness, and its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. The really great dramatic movements of the world--that of Spain in the age of Calderon and Lope de Vega , that of England in the spacious times of great Elizabeth, that of France from to the end of the nineteenth century--have broadened their appeal to every class.

The queen and the orange-girl joyed together in the healthiness of Rosalind; the king and the gamin laughed together at the rogueries of Scapin. The breadth of Shakespeare's appeal remains one of the most significant facts in the history of the drama. Tell a filthy-faced urchin of the gutter that you know about a play that shows a ghost that stalks and talks at midnight underneath a castle-tower, and a man that makes believe he is out of his head so that he can get the better of a wicked king, and a girl that goes mad and drowns herself, and a play within a play, and a funeral in a churchyard, and a duel with poisoned swords, and a great scene at the end in which nearly everyone gets killed: I have been to a thirty-cent performance of Othello in a middle-western town, and have felt the audience thrill with the headlong hurry of the action.

Yet these are the plays that cloistered students study for their wisdom and their style! And let us not forget, in this connection, that a similar breadth of appeal is neither necessary nor greatly to be desired in those forms of literature that, unlike the drama, are not written for the crowd.

What do theatre audiences want?

The greatest non-dramatic poet and the greatest novelist in English are appreciated only by the few; but this is not in the least to the discredit of Milton and of Meredith. One indication of the greatness of Mr. Kipling's story, They , is that very few have learned to read it. Victor Hugo in his preface to Ruy Blas , has discussed this entire principle from a slightly different point of view. He divides the theatre audience into three classes--the thinkers, who demand characterization; the women, who demand passion; and the mob, who demand action--and insists that every great play must appeal to all three classes at once.

Certainly Ruy Blas itself fulfils this desideratum, and is great in the breadth of its appeal. Yet although all three of the necessary elements appear in the play, it has more action than passion and more passion than characterization. And this fact leads us to the theory, omitted by Victor Hugo from his preface, that the mob is more important than the women and the women more important than the thinkers, in the average theatre audience. Indeed, a deepr consideration of the subject almost leads us to discard the thinkers as a psychologic force and to obliterate the distinction between the women and the mob.

It is to an unthinking and feminine-minded mob that the dramatist must first of all appeal; and this leads us to believe that action with passion for its motive is the prime essential for a play. For, nowadays at least, it is most essential that the drama should appeal to a crowd of women.

'We're all latte-sipping snowflakes'

Very few men go to the theatre unattached; and these few are not important enough, from a theoretic standpoint, to alter the psychological aspect of the audience. And it is this that constitutes one of the most important differences between a modern theatre audience and other kinds of crowds. The influence of this fact upon the dramatist is very potent.

First of all, as I have said, it forces him to deal chiefly in action with passion for its motive. And this necessity accounts for the preponderance of female characters over male in the large majority of the greatest modern plays. Notice Nora Helmer, Mrs. Ebbsmith, Iris, and Letty--to cite only a few examples. Furthermore, since modern theatre audiences are comparatively inattentive, the dramatist is forced to employ the elementary technical tricks of repetition and parallelism, in order to keep his play clear, though much of it be unattended to.

This, of course, is seldom necessary in a novel, where things may be said once and for all. The prevailing inattentiveness of a theatre audience at the present day is due also to the fact that it is peculiarly conscious of itself, apart from the play that it has come to see.

Account Options

Many people "go to the theatre," as the phrase is, without caring much whether they see one play or another; what they want chiefly is to immerse themselves in a theatre audience. This is especially true, in New York, of the large percentage of people from out of town who "go to the theatre" merely as one phase of their metropolitan experience. It is true, also, of the many women in the boxes and the orchestra who go less to see than to be seen. It is one of the great difficulties of the dramatist that he must capture and enchain the attention of an audience thus composed.

A man does not pick up a novel unless he cares to read it; but many people go to the theatre chiefly for the sense of being there. Certainly, therefore, the problem of the dramatist is, in this respect, more difficult than that of the novelist, for he must make his audience lose consciousness of itself in the consciousness of his play.

One of the most essential differences between a theatre audience and other kinds of crowds lies in the purpose for which it is convened. This purpose is always recreation. A theatre audience is therefore less serious than a church congregation or a political or social convention.

It does not come to be edified or educated; it has no desire to be taught: It seeks amusement--in the widest sense of the word--amusement through laughter, sympathy, terror, and tears. And it is amusement of this sort that the great dramatists have ever given it.

A mouthpiece to the people

The trouble with most of the dreamers who league themselves for the uplifting of the stage is that they consider the theatre with an illogical solemnity. They base their efforts on the proposition that a theatre audience ought to want to be edified. As a matter of fact, no audience ever does. They wrote plays to please the crowd; and if, through their inherent greatness, they became teachers as well as entertainers, they did so without any tall talk about the solemnity of their mission. Their audiences learned largely, but they did so unawares--God being with them when they knew it not.

The demand for an endowed theatre in America comes chiefly from those who believe that a great play cannot earn its own living. Yet Hamlet has made more money than any other play in English; The School for Scandal never fails to draw; and in our own day we have seen Cyrano de Bergerac coining money all around the world. There were not any endowed theatres in Elizabethan London. Give the crowd the sort of plays it wants, and you will not have to seek beneficence to keep your theatre floating.

But, on the other hand, no endowed theatre will ever lure the crowd to listen to the sort of plays it does not want. There is a wise maxim appended to one of Mr. George Ade's Fables in Slang: It is willing enough to come without urging to see Othello and The Second Mrs. Give us one great dramatist who understands the crowd, and we shall not have to form societies to propagate his art.

Any play that is really great as drama will interest the many. One point remains to be considered. Yet it's a relationship that is often fraught with difficulties, suspicion and a lack of trust. In fact it often doesn't feel like a relationship at all; more of a marriage of convenience. Some like Howard Barker don't care if the audience listens or not.

In contrast, David Mamet has suggested that for a writer learning about theatre "the audience before it leaves the theatre and puts on — as do you or I — its wise, critical hat is the only judge. If the audience members didn't laugh, it wasn't funny. If they didn't gasp, it wasn't surprising.

If they did not sit forward in their seats it is not suspenseful. Maybe we can take Mamet's idea further. If despite all the theatre marketing, social and otherwise, the audience don't turn up at the appointed time on the appointed night, could it be that they are simply not interested in what we are doing? Or merely that there is something more interesting on the telly? Nobody has a right to an audience: Often it feels as if in theatre we want an audience, but only on our terms. Maybe we should trust them more , rather than getting anxious that all they will demand are nationwide productions of We Will Rock You.

Maybe we should stop seeing them as the audience and start seeing them as collaborators. Maybe it's the false divide between artists and audiences that is creating the problem. Maybe it's the term "artist" itself that is off-putting, as if artists are some breed apart from the rest of the human race. Alison Pilling at the Leeds-based Culturevulture blog suggests that the labels are unhelpful because many people are audiences some of the time and artists some of the time too.

Next Wednesday Culturevulture is holding a meeting for audiences in Leeds so they can have their say. There will be games.

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