I love Edinburgh festival audiences. They are so patient, so prepared to suffer for art, so out for a good time. They stand in queues in the rain, they sit in small, stuffy rooms on uncomfortable seats, they often have a drink in hand, but they are engaged and behave impeccably. So far, I’ve not been in a single show where a mobile phone has gone off. They show their appreciation generously, even when the show has been a bit rubbish. They are invested in what they see.
Why? There has been lots of debate recently bemoaning audience behaviour in the West End of London, some of it suggesting that first-time theatregoers are too blame, because they don’t know the rules. But while there are an awful lot of practitioners seeing each other’s shows in Edinburgh, there are also many people for whom this is their first theatre experience – or the only time of the year when they venture to the theatre.
As the audiences at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child prove, you don’t have to know any rules to be fully engaged in the theatre, you only have to want to be there and be told a really good story in an imaginative way.
When I spoke recently to Harry Potter’s director, John Tiffany, whose production of The Glass Menagerie is at the Edinburgh international festival, he talked about realising how important it was to get the Potter play right for an audience who are heavily invested in the story, but for whom theatre is not a familiar medium. It was a responsibility he took very seriously.
“I knew in my heart that this is theatre on trial, because we’ve all read the books and we’ve all seen the films and have an expectation. Sixty per cent of the audience who have booked are first-time theatregoers, so I wanted to create a love letter to theatre and say to people it’s not about comparing the stage show with the books and films, but [rather]: ‘This is what theatre can do and no other art form can.’ All we need is your imagination. So, that was the guiding principle for us – it felt very pure because of that. Like a kind of rough magic.”
The magic is often very, very rough at the fringe. Every show has to work hard to make the audience remember that they aren’t sitting in a lecture theatre or a converted church or a community centre. But I sometimes wonder whether it is the temporary makeshift nature of these venues that diminishes some of the barriers that surround purpose-built theatre. It is less intimidating. The fact there are no swish sets or special effects makes the audience work harder; they have to bring their imaginations to bear, because nobody is doing the work for them. Proximity to the action often makes you feel more involved.
Perhaps the fact that most shows are so short also has something to do with it. Some may argue that an hour-long slot doesn’t allow room for depth, but goodness it is better to leave any audience wanting more than having been bored to death.
As Anthony Neilson observed almost 10 years ago in an article that is still relevant and worth a read, “boring the audience is the one true sin of theatre”. There are plenty of sins on the Edinburgh fringe, but there are other factors at work that make the audience a forgiving one.
