I got to the Gateway of India just as the boat pulled away from the pier. Damn it! I had missed the last boat of the day to Mandwa. I felt a cocktail of emotions — irritation, anger, disgust, disappointment and frustration, all welled up in me and each taking precedence by turn. My mind flashed back to repeated conversations I’d had with latecomers to plays, explaining why they were not being let in — “If you were late for a train, would it wait for you?”
Now, the shoe was on the other foot.
Recently, audience behaviour at theatre shows has become more callous. There seems to be very little concern for fellow audience members or the performers.
The worst kind is the Supper Theatre crowd, who regularly rise during the performance to refill their glasses. And share comments with neighbours as though it were a public service announcement. You could, like most evils in our society, blame this on the alcohol. But then how come the Comedy Store Crowd, which also carries their drinks into the show, is so well behaved.
In most regular theatres food and drink is not allowed. Many a performance has been ruined by an ill-timed opening of a wafers packet. But it seems that the “new” theatre audience is getting even bolder. At a recent play, two women pulled out a bottle of wine and wine glasses from their hand bags and then “sipped” away through the performance. To their credit, they did not disturb the performance at all.
The advent of camera phones is another new annoyance. The idea of people to capture and “post” what they are doing, rather than actually experience, has led to numerous audience members disturb the performers with their “flashing phones”.
The most vitriolic audiences seem to be the ones that have turned up late.
From vowing to disrupt the performance, to arguing at top volume outside, to even threatening physical violence. In larger auditoria, late comers can often be seated in the balcony till the interval, after which they can take up their rightful seats. But in the smaller venues, late comers are incredibly distracting. What’s more, everyone spends a few minutes looking for their friends which disrupts the performance even more. At the NGMA, once an elderly lady entered mid show, and instead of occupying the nearest available seat, she began calling out her son, so that she could sit next to him. Very few venues across the country have a strong “No Late Comers Policy”.
Prithvi has managed to discipline its audience into adhering to the clock. Most theatre patrons, however, think it is their right to be let in; and some members have even ventured back stage to try and get into the audience. However, nothing has influenced the theatre watching experience as much as the mobile phone and people’s obsessive need to be “in touch” — whether by text messaging or calling or answering. Recently during a performance of Dayashankar Ki Diary, director Nadira Zaheer Babbar, had to actually admonish an audience member whose phone was ringing. Often ringing phones are answered with “I’m in a play”, as though that absolves the offender from the responsibility of keeping the phone on in the first place.
Innovative ways to entertain the audience into switching their phones off have not been that effective. Dramatisations, pleas, announcements, explanations, and even imploring the audience all fall on deaf ears. Nowadays a new backstage ritual has been added. Just before a show goes up, the actors and crew place bets on how many phones will ring on a particular night. The average is usually four for a 80 minute piece. That is an interruption every 20 minutes.
I recently met a foreigner who had been touring the sub continent watching all sorts of plays. His summation — “The only thing that unites all Indian theatre, irrespective of language, style or location, is that in every performance, a mobile phone will go off.”