A reliable tear-jerker: Alex Jennings and Claire Skinner in The Winter's Tale. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Last week something quite unusual happened to me in the theatre. Twice. Towards the end of both Forced Entertainment's The World in Pictures and Imitating the Dog's Hotel Methuselah I found my throat constricting and my eyes pricking and knew that I was going to cry.
I reckon I probably cry more than most people in the theatre, but it is still a fairly rare occurrence even for me - although a good production of The Winter's Tale never fails to get me where it hurts. I once wept during a production of 42nd Street, suddenly overcome by an appalling sense of loss that I'd never be able to tap-dance like that - a skill that until that moment I'd never realised I'd had any desire to acquire. But I know plenty of people who, although they admit to blubbing away all the time in the cinema, claim never to have shed a single tear in the theatre.
Why is that? What makes it so hard to cry in the theatre, but easy to do at the movies?
Perhaps it is simply that crying in the theatre is so exposing. It is never quite as dark as it is in the cinema and when the lights come up they do so quickly, leaving you feeling like an idiot and wiping the snot with your sleeve while grinning actors take their bow. At the movies at least you have the credits to collect yourself.
For all the talk of theatre being a shared communal experience, it is rare for a theatre audience to start a collective sobbing. I can only recall it on three occasions: a performance of the RSC's Peter Pan in the 1980s, at the press night of Larry Kramer's Aids play The Normal Heart at the Royal Court and last year at a Saturday matinee of Coram Boy at the National which as it reached its emotional climax had everybody around me reaching for the tissues.
Coram Boy, of course, makes cunning use of music and I think that might be key. Cinema often uses music in a much more emotionally manipulative way than theatre, and I bet more people cry watching Madame Butterfly than they do watching King Lear for the same reason. On the other hand I've never met anyone who has said that they've cried during the ballet, and that uses music too.
Often the tears really flow when you identify with a character or situation. I once took a girlfriend - in the middle of a messy relationship breakup - to see† Patrick Marber's Closer at the NT. Not long in, she started weeping uncontrollably and when the lights came up at the interval she was in such a state I suggested we leave. She wouldn't hear of it.
"I don't want to leave. I love it," she sobbed. "It's the best play I've ever seen - and it's all about me."
So if you've ever lost it in the theatre let me know when and why, and if you can throw any light on why it's so much harder to cry in the theatre than in the cinema I'd love to hear from you too.
