Audience Participation

I've just been involved in a play for the last week that involves a lot of audience participation. The show was The Farndale...Mikado (not it's full title, I'll stress); the premise is that an awful amateur dramatics company are attempting to put on The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan. Anything that can go wrong, does.

To get the audience into the mood of such a play, it is necessary to have a "pre-amble", where the actors and crew create the environment of the show as the audience enter the auditorium. It could be a prop being constantly moved from one side of the stage to the other; a director constantly losing his grip minutes before the show has even started proper; curtains that refuse to close conventionally. Yes, it takes a little getting used to but the audience eventually gets the basic idea.

When you go to see a piece of theatre, I truly believe that you gain so much more of an experience from it the more involved you are. When I directed The Diary Of Anne Frank in 2010 I particularly wanted the set to come out into the audience, for the only entrance and exit to the outside world to be the door that the audience had come into. For that purpose the curtains were open as they arrived. I plan a similar concept for my next project, Art, due in June this year, and a production that I will report back on from time to time in this blog.

I think this is why pantomimes are still as popular as they ever have been. They're about having fun, going out and being entertained; in the case of Anne Frank it means more - you get to learn more because you're more immersed in the story, you're more aware of what's going on around you. We stop being merely entertainers and take on the second role of educators. Farndale could be argued as being more panto-based than anything else, but it still has the same effect.

There's nothing wrong with a familiar box-stage production where everything happens on stage and the audience sit un-bothered and seemingly unnoticed by the people acting. However, as the continuing growth in the trend for one-on-one theatre has shown, theatre needs to once in a while shake itself and its audience up a bit; the quicker it does it, the better.