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Go behind the scenes with our anonymous blogger to find out why anyone would want to run a small venue when pills are so much quicker and rope so inexpensive....This month, he tackles audiences and critics.
The worst and the best thing about going to, being in or reviewing the OffWestEnd can often be the audience.
Having a lot of friends either working in, running or producing work in small spaces all over London, I receive at least one text a week asking me to drum up some support for a specified performance because a critic is coming. This blind panic that so regularly infects even the most stable and stolid fringe production is well justified. After all, once, the set has been skipped (or abandoned on a mini-roundabout close to your venue) and the costumes have been torn up for scrap (or more likely made their way into your regular wardrobe rotation), all you have left are the reviews.
For me there is a slight morbid curiosity to all of this as I, for about a year, was a reviews manager for an increasingly popular website that covers the majority of Fringe and OffWestEnd openings. And, let me tell you, it was a varied experience. In that year I saw just shy of 350 productions – not a quantity I’d recommend – and the notable experiences I had seemed to fall into the same 4 categories. I was wondering if they’d been the same for any other OffWestEnd reviewer?
1.The Lone Critic
It would not be an exaggeration to say that for about a third of all productions I attended, that weren’t on a designated Press Night, I was alone in the audience with only a programme, an orange squash and an usher for company.
This is an incredibly awkward situation.
Although not in the way you might imagine.
As soon as the critic is alone in the audience the pressure shifts for the actors, who outnumber you substantially, to your own singular performance. For a serious play this is quite easy: sit still, don’t crunch the ice in your drink, don’t fall asleep and leave quickly at the end.
The trick comes when the piece is designed to function with some sort of audience reaction. Laughter being the most cruel. Does laughing help the performers? Would a single laugh amongst 50 empty seats act as encouragement or just a constant reminder that there’s only one person out there in the dark.
On one occasion a cast of about eight actors took to the stage and it appeared that the venue or producer had not informed them they’d be playing to a single ticket holder. Slowly, one by one, I could see them notice that nobody, bar me, was watching. At the interval I was told by the duty manager, rather gruffly, that the second half would not be going ahead. I had obviously failed.
However awful it can be to think about being the only person in a ‘crowd’ at least there is a silent dignity to it. Nothing is worse than…
2. Being amongst friends
I can see how this happens. In the West End where producers have thousands of seats to fill of course they invite lots of friends and family to fill out the evening so as to have at least some of the audience willing the show along.
However, in a 40 seater venue it is totally possible to go and review something and be entirely surrounded by very vocal friends of the cast and production.
At one show I went to review, towards the end of my tenure, I arrived in the theatre bar to find that everyone queuing at the box office was wearing florescent pink t-shirts with the show logo on. As we all took our seats I felt like I’d stumbled into a mixture of a religious cult gathering and a hen night. Their reaction to the show was bewildering. Most of the audience laughed througout, often way before any punch line and most of the time at the first arrival on stage of each actor. One actor, inexplicably, got a round of applause on his first entrance. I checked the programme to see if he might be famous – turns out he’d yet to even graduate from Sixth Form.
3. The cheats
A short description but worth a mention.
As a reviewer, the reason I stopped taking notes is that it seemed increasingly hard to write things down without distracting the people around me and enticing them to try and see what I’d been scribbling as if we were sitting a communal exam and they were trying to read my answer sheet.
In fact, I noticed a direct correlation between the more secretive and discreet I tried to be in taking notes, the more interested and curious those sitting around me became. Better this, though, than the fate of the critic who fell asleep during Cause Celebre in the same row as James McAvoy who was proudly watching his wife on stage until he became more than interested in the lack of scribbling at the end of the row.
4.The first timers
The last, and by all means best, audiences are the first timers. There are a lot of these on the small scale and they can be a reminder of why doing work on our intimate level can be so incredibly rewarding.
Either used to television or the huge aircraft hanger stages of the West End, a lot of audiences who travel to see their friends perform on the Fringe have never experienced acting or storytelling so up close and personal before.
Everything that is great about OffWestEnd hits them: the sense of danger through the proximity to the action, the rawness and urgency of the storytelling, the communal sense of all being in one room, sharing the same hot air, watching the actors telling stories just for us.
The comment I’ve heard most often from first timers is that “I didn’t know it could be like that”.
This sort of electrified enthusiasm is infectious and, for those of us who learnt however long ago that it could indeed be like that, it often takes someone seeing it for the first time to help us remember.
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