I wanted to see a preview of The Late Henry Moss, the Sam Shepard play at the Almeida in London, and was offered a choice between seats where you can't see much at all (with which the Almeida is generously provisioned) and super-brilliant seats for £29 each. So, sighing deeply, I forked out. And these were not just any good seats -- they were front-row seats. By rights, forbidden territory for the Back-row Blogger.
The disadvantages of front-row seats are legion. There's that thing of getting a neck-crick through constantly staring upwards. There's the unpleasant risk of being spat on by actors. There's the less frequent but no less real danger of being splashed (this has happened to me on two occasions -- once in Jonathan Kent's production of Hecuba at the Donmar, which involved a very liquid "sea", and once in a 1980s RSC production of As You Like It, for which I remember being provided with plastic sheeting to protect against a drenching caused by antics in the set's babbling brook). Worst of all is the dread peril of being required to enter into some humiliating form of audience participation -- though obviously that wasn't going to be much of a problem here.
On the whole, though, the pleasures of the front row outweigh the pain. The fact that you can't see anyone else in front of you makes the experience seem so much more immediate. In intimate spaces like the Almeida, you could reach out and touch the stage; you almost feel part of what's happening on it. When I saw Mary Stuart at the Donmar at the front of the theatre, on an aisle, I could feel the draught from their swooshing skirts as Janet McTeer and Harriet Walters swept by.
One of the most extraordinary experiences in the theatre in my life was being taken to see Tristan und Isolde - in the front row at the Vienna Opera. You could see the beads of sweat on the singers's brows, and gaze down into the orchestral pit to witness the parallel drama unfolding there. It was amazing -- though purists would argue, fairly, that in opera the sound tends to be better further back. (But it's worth knowing that the front couple of rows at Covent Garden are cheaper than the other stalls seats.)
Best thing of all, at The Late Henry Moss I was on the other side of the theatre from the on-stage bathtub - and thus escaped a good old dousing.
