No, no ... thank you! Actors in The Producers enjoy a curtain call at Covent Garden's Theatre Royal. Photograph: David Levene
It happened last night at In Celebration and last week at Saint Joan. Here were the two latest examples of the British theatre's unique capacity for selling itself short when it comes to the curtain call, that closing theatrical gesture uniting audience and actor alike in a moment of release. What difference does it make, I can hear sceptics grumbling, how long the curtain call lasts? Surely the luvvies deserve a quick clap or two and then off to the pub. But such an attitude misunderstands how essential the bows are as a shared act of closure. Don't believe me? Ask anyone who saw the Neil LaBute play The Shape of Things some years back during the Almeida's King's Cross season: that staging deliberately denied its cast any curtain call at all, resulting in a distinctly queasy feeling as the audience made its way home.
More recent curtain calls have merely tended towards the frustrating. It's surely unfair to the labours of a cast, not least on press night, for them to come out for a third call amidst darkness, as was the case last night at In Celebration until someone somewhere was generous enough to illuminate the stage. At the opening night of Marianne Elliott's blistering production of Saint Joan, a rapt audience was clearly ready to prolong applause that seemed curtailed - the British tendency towards self-denial, perhaps, extending itself to such theatrical niceties.
This isn't a problem elsewhere. Broadway has never been shy about bowing as long as is necessary to get the audience on its feet, though the Continent can be just as showy. Last month, I looked on astonished in Prague as a Czech-language staging of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll got a good half dozen or more bows following a matinee performance whose leading man, I regret to say, wasn't a patch on London's own Rufus Sewell. Some years ago, I saw a production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in Paris which starred Roman Polanski as Mozart; the bows that evening threatened to exceed the length of the play itself, as was to be expected, I suppose, from a rare live theatrical outing from a cinematic master.
What I'm not asking for are the sorts of florid, self-conscious bows that justifiably belong to a bygone era - or to the realm of Barbra Streisand, say, in concert. But I genuinely think theatre people err in underestimating the willingness, keenness even, of their audiences to cheer the work they've come to see. I vividly recall the collective disgruntlement the opening night at the National in 1993 when Declan Donnellan's production of the musical Sweeney Todd refused solo bows for its superlative leads, Alun Armstrong and Julia McKenzie. "But this is an ensemble piece," I was told at the time, "not a star vehicle" - which is to discredit the achievement of two performers who went on to win Olivier awards for that very show. We've worked hard and sometimes paid a lot to attend the production; the cast has worked harder to offer it up to us. So why sell short that moment of communal rapture that Shakespeare's Globe, to its credit, turns into a rapturous dance? If you didn't like the show, you can always leave, but please allow the rest of us a proper moment or two to applaud.
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