The beauty of a good old-fashioned farce is that, come the curtain, you can leave the theatre without your conscience prodding you to come up with anything like deep thoughts. Last week, however, on emerging from Michael Frayn's old-boy classic, Donkey's Years, I had one. Not deep, mind you, and neither brow-furrowing nor jaw-dropping, but a thought nonetheless.
While in the pub across from the theatre, I discovered that while my companions and I had greeted Frayn's slapstick with plentiful guffaws and snorts, the play's cast had thought the audience to be deader than a doped-up dormouse.
This had put them off (not that I'd noticed, but then I laugh at my own jokes), and made them feel awkward, even furious. Timings were awry, cues askew, and the electricity that keeps the company barrelling along had sparked out. The general feeling was, indeed, that the evening's crowd were pure evil.
The problem is clear enough: the cast is only really aware of the audience at the front end of the stalls, usually stocked with besuited bonus-slaves and wealthy tourists busy sleeping off their boozy lunches or whistlestop coach tours. No amount of trousers-around-ankles could stir them to a decent semblance of mirth.
Hence my thought. Why not shunt these dozing fat cats off to the circles, out of the cast's earshot, and fill the stalls with everyone else? All the theatre needs to do is make the circle seats the priciest ones. It's a marketing no-brainer - the business class always go for the most expensive option wherever they are. it gives them something to discuss over dinner, in case the wine list is insufficiently astronomical.
It shouldn't just go for slapstick comedy, either. The atmosphere at most operas and tragedies these days is stifled by feigned reverence from the suits up front.
After all, actors need audiences to make them feel alive. And if they don't feel alive, sooner or later they won't look it, either.
Not that I can tell, of course - I'm just after a cheap seat slightly nearer the stage.
