Lord of the Rings: scenery went its own way in a preview. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Last week I went to see Jonathan Kent's production of The Country Wife at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the West End. The show was supposed to start at 7.30 but 15 minutes on and the house lights were still up and the safety curtain (which strikingly depicts a naked woman riding a cow) was still in place. As the audience grew more fidgety, a timid-looking stage manager appeared and announced apologetically that they were "having a few problems with the sound". To which an American woman in the audience replied, with the kind of timing and dryness of tone that most actors would kill for: "I'm sorry, honey, but I didn't hear a word you just said."
After a few more minutes, it was decided that the performance should go ahead minus the music and sound effects. There were some murmurs of dissent from the crowd at this - and, bizarrely, a smattering of impatient foot-stamping - but once the production got underway, the technical problems were barely noticeable, the bawdy exuberance of the play successfully carrying things along.
There were fewer prop malfunctions on the nights I saw both Avenue Q and Little Shop Of Horrors (a canvas banner and a dentist's X-ray light-box were the respective culprits), but these problems were resolved without the actors breaking character, and both occurred in shows that had a rough-around-the-edges charm that made them quite capable of withstanding such mishaps. However, in more understated and emotionally involving productions I suspect such things would have proved far more jarring.
The West End is probably most susceptible to such problems, with more elaborate and technically complex sets, props and costumes. (Indeed, I've yet to hear of a fringe show where the scenery starts mangling the actors instead of the other way round as happened in one of the previews for Lord of the Rings). Though, of course, fringe theatre, with budgets tight and resources limited, is prone to its own prop problems.
I'd be interested to know what shows people have seen sabotaged by their own sets, by absent effects and reluctant revolves. Did it affect your enjoyment of the production, or are these occasional technical mishaps, just part of the beauty of live performance? Is there ever a point when, for the sake of cast and audience alike, a production should be abandoned? Or should the show always, always go on regardless?
