Russell Tovey as Tintin. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
If Jay Rayner had his way and our theatres were awash with explicitly rightwing drama, would we be able to cope? I'm not talking about our reaction to the plays (which, personally, I'd find irritating if not soul-destroying), but about how we'd deal with the audiences. Because any theatre that put on a rightwing programme (a feelgood line-up of Privatisers on Parade, Ezra Pound: The Musical and Mosley on Down, a nostalgic comedy about life on the fascist front-line) would want to attract a new crowd of politically sympathetic punters. And I don't reckon the existing crowd would like it.
Only last weekend, a man disappeared into the night after making racist remarks during a performance of Tintin. According to reports, he took a ten-year-old boy to Woking's New Victoria Theatre and made "loud racially aggravated comments" during the performance and then in the bar.
You can't blame the poor guy. He was probably expecting a celebration of Hergé's colonialism, the kind of tosh you find in Tintin in the Congo. When that book was discovered on the children's shelves of a branch of Borders earlier this year it caused a storm of outrage. A spokeswoman for the Commission for Racial Equality said: "The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying 'old fashioned, racist claptrap'."
How disappointed the man must have been to see the hearty fare put together by playwright David Greig and director Rufus Norris, good liberals both. There is rightly no place for racism in their play and the news story illustrates that there is no place for it in the auditorium either.
OK, so being rightwing doesn't make you a racist (I know because David Cameron tells me so), but it strikes me that theatre audiences are intolerant of any behaviour that breaks the rules of liberal decorum. The man's comments were not just "racially aggravated," they were also "loud," an equal sin to the theatre-loving aesthete. People like him stick out in the theatre. They have the wrong attitudes and don't play by the rules.
In in a less extreme case, however, would theatregoers be any more forgiving? Would it be acceptable for someone to heckle a David Hare play because of its socialist leanings? If not and if it really is the case that people with oppositional views and different ways of expressing them can't be accommodated in the stalls, then aren't we kidding ourselves to imagine that theatre - of whatever political perspective - will ever appeal to a broad church?
