Real Tears

I've been thinking about audiences a fair bit this week and the part they play in the theatre (pun intended), prompted in part by reading Ackroyd's theatrically aware biography of Shakespeare. You don't get good plays without having good audiences, I'm wont to tell students and, despite the slight simplifying involved, I think I get it pretty much right.

Last Sunday's audience for The Lion King was a good one - appreciative, respectful of the details of performance, vocal in the right places. But they got one moment fascinatingly wrong. It was when the old lion king has died and is lying dead. The lionesses gather round and cry - pulling actual streamers of ribbons from the eyes in their masks. The effect was strangely moving and grotesque. Yet there was quite a bit of laughter, coming largely from the adults in the audience, I think.

Noi, the girls and I talked about it afterward. Fifi and Fafa knew the moment wasn't intended for laughter, confirming my sense that the effect was a well-judged one that shouldn't have gone wrong. So why had it? My sense was that the laughers had simply not managed to enter the mood of the scene, the world of the play. The lionesses, for them, remained rather wonderfully costumed actresses and were fair game for laughter when they did something that was so obviously false. But for those of us that art had transformed, laughter had been the last thing on our minds at that moment of solemn ritual.

Once audiences lose that capacity for allowing themselves to accept the necessary illusions of performance they (we) lose something not so much precious as irreplaceable. And I suspect they know they've lost it despite all the applause that hides the missing treasure.