WHAT IS THIS PROJECT?

‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’ is a research study looking at how theatre audiences value the experience of attending performances. The focus is on the self-reported description of experiences of individuals who attend the theatre, which will be gathered mainly through online questionnaires, interviews, and creative workshops. We will also tap memory by asking some subjects about a performance they saw one year ago.

WHO IS LEADING THIS PROJECT AND WHO IS INVOLVED?

This project is led by the University of Warwick, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and is carried out in collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London, Manchester Metropolitan University, and The British Theatre Consortium (BTC), a small think-tank of academics and artists. Professor Janelle Reinelt (Warwick) is the principal investigator; Professor Dan Rebellato of Royal Holloway and Lecturer Julie Wilkinson of Manchester Metropolitan are co-investigators. The playwright David Edgar is consultant to the project –all are members of the BTC. In addition, the project has three theatre partners: the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic, and the Drum Theatre in Plymouth, who are facilitating this research.

WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIVES?

•To explore audience experiences of attending theatre productions focusing on phenomenological self-description and analysis.

•To understand how specific theatre experiences are valued (or not) by audience members.

•To identify associational networks of experiences that together with theatre attendance give rise to value attribution.

•To question the difference time makes to value attribution by gathering data just after the theatre experience, two months later, and in relation to an experience at least a year before the present study.

•To vary the methods used: quantitative and qualitative methods; social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) ; self-reflexive dialogic interaction and creative writing.

•To run a study that could lead to long-term longitudinal research of viewing practices and value attribution over a three to five year period.

The research examines how individuals process the cognitive and affective experience of seeing a theatre performance in relation to their context (location, identity, and moment-in-time), their previous theatre histories, and their associational networks.

WHAT IS THE PROJECT TIME-LINE?

The research will be carried out in the next nine months, culminating in several open public events to discuss the research findings in May 2014. WATCH THIS SITE FOR INFORMATION AND UPDATES ON THESE EVENTS.

By David Edgar

Last autumn, I attended a conference on audience participation at the ICA. Organised by the University of Kent, the first afternoon consisted of nine papers, each presented by a standing person (or persons) to a silent, seated audience. There was no time for discussion or questions. The organisers wrily acknowledged the irony of this, assuring us that things would be more participatory tomorrow.

Although there were differences of opinion, the line of the day was that the point of audience participation was to challenge the idea of the single author (the conference was subtitled “on audience and authorship”). As journalist and critic Catherine Love put it: “Once we recognise the role of an audience in actively crafting interpretations, can we continue to locate the generation of meaning in theatre with a sole author?”.

For me, the presentations had an element of déjà vu. When I began in theatre, in the early 70s, a considerable amount of audience participation was an unintended consequence of the 1968 abolition of theatre censorship (which, among other things, made improvisation impossible). Planted audience members – which go back, at least, to Clifford Odets 1937 Waiting for Lefty –  appeared in John Osborne’s 1972 A Sense of Detachment and elsewhere. The Traverse Theatre Workshop’s U2 was a promenade show for a single audience member (who didn’t know that when they booked). In Joint Stock’s 1974 The Speakers, the audience chose which Speakers’ Corner didacts should rant next (and heckled them). The Living Theatre 1969 season at the Roundhouse involved an invitation to the audience to strip off and join in. My own work at the time included a play in which the course of the action was chosen by an audience vote, and another in which the outcome was decided nightly by the decision of a computer (occupying, at the time, an entire room) on the basis of an audience survey. In another, the audience was arrested for singing a song which contravened the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act 1971.

The big difference between the audience participation of the early 70s and the projects described at the ICA was the intention of the process. As a form of authorship, audience involvement is part of a democratising procedure (the Tate has a Director of Audiences, but I don’t think it quite means that). In the early 70s, by contrast, audience participation was largely a matter of manipulating theatrical convention in order to create meaning. The fact that, in my play about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the play could end with a peaceful resolution or Armageddon on the say-so of a machine was making a point about the risks of nuclear escalation, not about the relative importance of different elements in the theatre-making process. Often, participation was involuntary and it was sometimes physically or even sexually threatening.

One reason for this was because the attitude to the audience was different.  In the 60s and 70s, audiences in the non-commercial theatre were essentially “guilty creatures sitting at a play”. George Devine was notoriously dismissive of the “fashionable assholes” who made up the audience during his glory-years as director of the Royal Court. Probably the most famous German play of the 60s was Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience. Asked about his attitude to those who paid good money to see his early plays, Howard Brenton is reputed to have replied “I want to piss in their eyeballs”.

What changed all that was Thatcherism. What happened with Mrs Thatcher’s election in 1979, in culture as in all spheres of life, was a power-shift from the producer to the consumer. Her great political insight was that she could use the market-place to achieve essentially political objectives – in culture as much as in industrial relations she sought to disarm the left by letting the market rip.  So, like passengers, patients and parents, playgoers became “customers”, who as we know are always right. The first effect of this was on the high avant-garde – people were no longer prepared to accept that if they didn’t understand something it was their fault. Then, dominated by market demand for more of what the audience liked last time, theatre repertoires became increasingly homogenised. And finally, theatre artists who did shows in the commercial sector brought the audience-friendly ethos of the big musical back into the rehearsal rooms of the subsidized sector. By the end of the 80s, the big question asked of the playwright by directors and actors wasn’t “what are you saying here?” but “will they get this?”.

This isn’t to say all contemporary audience participation is purely get-up-and-join-in crowd-pleasing: in shows which involve individual interrogation, the Belgian group Ontroerend Goed  uncomfortably blurs the border between public and private. But from soap producers surveying audiences for plot outcomes to audiences voting how a courtroom drama should end, participation that doesn’t involve being embarrassed, abused or crawled over clearly implies a compliment: we’ve been working on this for weeks, but we think you can work out what ought to happen right now. If the risk of traditional, end stage, fourth wall drama is producer elitism, then the danger of audience participation is consumer populism.

Our research project into Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution started from the observation that it was much easier to measure the impact of theatre events on the participatory arts (particularly when the participants are conveniently assembled in schools, hospitals and prisons). Although we haven’t talked to participatory audiences, it’s clear that their activity is a form of judgement as well as co-authorship;  their responses would be different both from those of completely immersed participants and from people sitting silently in rows.

But we knew from our own experience that – however passive it may look – those audiences are participating in the event, by vocalising their responses (of course) but, more profoundly, by completing what they are seeing in their minds, relating what they are seeing to their own lives and their experience of the world, questioning a play’s plausibility, speculating about outcomes before they occur. This process generates meaning in the individual spectator’s mind, and has done so since 5^th century Athens. Hence we are asking audiences what they expect of shows before they attend them, their immediate responses afterwards and what they retain after time. Direct audience participation is one way of testing the profundity of such silent but active responses, but it’s not the only way.

David Edgar is a playwright and member of the British Theatre Consortium

By Janelle Reinelt

The AHRC research project we are currently running asks people to tell us how they ‘process’ their experiences of being at the theatre. As I process the research work, it is impossible not to review my own theatre-going history. I have been surprised by the extent and number of my memories as I assumed most would have disappeared into the proverbial sands of time. But instead, other people’s reminiscences have acted to catalyze mine—rather like Proust’s famous madeleine that unlocked the taste, texture and smell of a beloved morsel of childhood food.

In my case, I think the earliest performance I attended took place when I was around four. It was Puss in Boots, the ballet, probably produced by the San Francisco Ballet although I can’t be certain. What I do know is that so intense was my pleasure and immersion in the show that I immediately created an invisible feline friend for my own life, and talked to him and treated him as real for a very long time after. This might be a typical reaction of only child, which I was, and it signaled the role theatre and performance would play in my solitary childhood—it helped me survive. Along with reading novels, the theatre gave me a chance for vicarious and imaginative experiences that were intense, interesting, and beautiful.

When I was thirteen, I was able to participate in a summer theatre program at my secondary school. The shows we put on that summer (1960) were The Reluctant Debutante, The Glass Menagerie, Sabrina Fair, and Damn Yankees. I had a small part in The Reluctant Debutante which I remember not at all, and was in thrall to the older actors who I thought were brilliant in The Glass Menagerie. I can still hear Ann Lindzey as Amanda saying ‘Rise and shine. Rise and shine. Laura, tell your brother to rise and shine’ and the response, coming from Bob McCollar as Tom, ‘I’ll rise but I won’t shine!’ –-a line that became a part my personal repertory of teen-aged expressions!  What stayed was the cadence and music of delivery, the slight drawl of a Southern accent (probably a travesty!) that remained with me and marks the memory. When the girl who was slated to play Sabrina moved away with her family quite suddenly, I found myself cast as Sabrina. I had already seen and loved Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, the 1957 movie about the fashion world, so I was overwhelmed by my good fortune to mimic my ideal movie star in a stage play she made famous on film. But the character of Sabrina too—a lonely daughter of a single-parent chauffeur—allowed my own identity some scope for fictional expansion. And I must say, after all these years, I still remember my big speech. It finished with something like:

‘I want to be in the world, and of the world, and never just stand aside and watch’. It seemed to me then, and for much of my life, that these words summed up my own aspirations. And although being an academic might be said to involve a fair amount of standing aside and watching, mostly I have lived my life in and of the world.

We called that summer theatre programme ‘summer stock’, and it was as rank and amateur as you might imagine a small town high school summer season to be. Yet it took me a long way toward making my peace with adolescence and my own yearnings. It kept me sane; it gave me friends, my first real friends who shared something important with me. Recently, more than fifty years after that summer, I was contacted by someone who had been a part of that time. Mike had played Applegate in Damn Yankees (I had a chorus part) and the theatre had been an anchor and a place of belonging for him as it was for me. We found ourselves with our respective partners in London trading stories of shows we’d seen and loved over the years. He isn’t a performer anymore either; like me, he went in another direction somewhat related to theatre (in his case, into law). But he attends the theatre regularly in New York and Washington D.C. where he lives. We go to see different things now—he still loves Broadway musicals and comedies; I like ‘serious’ dramas and political theatre. But we both still love it with a passion which is partly to do with the foundational experiences of our early years and the imaginative possibilities it brought to both of our small-town lives as youngsters growing up in the early 1960s.

When the current public debates about the value of the arts reach my years, I want to say something melodramatic like ‘people need theatre –it saves their lives’. I can’t say that without sounding somewhat hysterical, but I can share how it happened to be the case with my life and some others I know.

Janelle Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick and a member of the British Theatre Consortium.

By Chris Megson

One of the compelling features of the AHRC project on Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution is the invitation to reflect on what kind of memories we take from attending performances and the various ways they become meaningful in our lives. Perhaps the first step in thinking about ‘value’ is to dredge one’s earliest memories of theatregoing and trace the images, sounds, feelings and associations that constellate around them.

Like many people, my first experience of attending theatre was the school play, the occasional musical and, in particular, the annual Christmas pantomime. The venue for the latter was the Bradford Alhambra in my home county of West Yorkshire. Built in 1913 and opened the following year, the Alhambra took its name from the famous palace in Granada although, with its impressive dome perched atop steep Corinthian pillars, the Bradford version looks nothing like its sprawling Andalusian namesake. In the nineteenth century, the city of Bradford was the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution, famous around the world for its wool and textile manufacture. The stately design of the Alhambra captures a sense of Edwardian economic confidence mixed with a heady dose of imperial exoticism. Today, exactly one hundred years after its construction, the theatre is the instantly-recognisable landmark in one of Britain’s most vibrant multicultural cities.

My grandmother (on my father’s side) was born two years after the Alhambra opened. She spent her working life, from the 1930s onwards, as a weaver in the textile mills at nearby Low Moor. She had retired by the time I became interested in drama as a teenager in the 1980s and I remember, around this time, she told me that she had taken elocution lessons as a girl. She had always guarded this fact quite closely, fearing that others would interpret elocution as snobbish disdain for her Yorkshire roots, but she nonetheless took pride in it. For many working-class families of her generation, elocution was the performance of the aspiration for social mobility but my grandmother was much more invested in elocution as a kind of rudimentary acting, one that enabled her to role-play the polished vowels of Hollywood cinema.

For a number of years, at the turn of the 1980s, our shared interest in theatre gathered momentum as the two of us (she in her mid-sixties, me around ten years old) went to see the annual pantomime at the Alhambra. Pantos have been staged at the theatre since the late 1920s and remain part of its DNA. By the early 1980s, the leading players at the Christmas panto tended to be comedians imported from ITV’s Saturday evening schedules and they included high-profile double acts like Cannon and Ball, and my grandmother’s erstwhile favourite Russ Abbot. These stars of ‘Light Entertainment’ were then at the height of their popularity: they had their own TV series and attracted millions of viewers each week. They were also, of course, direct descendants of the Variety performers of the Edwardian era for whom the Alhambra was first built as a ‘Palace of Varieties’ in 1913. Many of the working-class northern comics who appeared in the Bradford pantos started their careers touring clubs and pubs (Cannon and Ball first met as welders in Lancashire) and, on the back of this experience, were able to command the large Alhambra stage.

What do I remember of the shows? The bright colours, the immensity of the proscenium arch, bits of physical comedy and sing-along, the inevitable frisson of seeing television ‘personalities’ live on stage. I have a dusty recollection of an impressive beanstalk escalating from centre-stage. My memories of the audience are much more vivid: the giddy terror induced by our proximity to the performers (would we be called onstage?), the red velvet seats in the stalls and the deafening shouts of spectators. The interior décor of the Alhambra was modelled on Louis XVI, no less, and the high-decibel noise seemed to me wonderfully subversive, like yodelling in Buckingham Palace.

Above all, however, a single image comes to mind when I think of the pantos: my grandmother and I are sitting next to each other in the auditorium, the performance is taking place in front of us on the stage, and we’re glancing at each other and smiling. When I recall this image, I see the two of us together but from the perspective of an external observer, an outside eye, so this visual fragment cannot feasibly ‘reproduce’ a moment that actually happened – but yet this image always pops up when I recall my time at the Alhambra. I’m reminded of a comment made by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman in his book, Re-Visioning Psychology. Hillman argues that the study of human consciousness needs to be ‘based in a psychology of image […] a poetic basis of mind […] that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the processes of imagination.’ For Hillman, the mind, like the theatre, is fundamentally concerned with the production of images and these images, whether in dreams or memories, carry symbolic or ‘poetic’ properties when recollected. The impossible image-memory I have retained – of my grandmother watching me, watching her, both of us smiling – is in this sense a distillation, an emblem (or what Hillman calls a ‘fantasy-image’), of this early memory of theatre, which also happens to be a formative experience of spectatorship. And the pleasure I gain from its recollection today, some years after my grandmother’s death, affirms that other people’s (as well as our own) response to theatrical performance is intrinsic to the operation of memory in spectatorship. Theatre is a practice that engages audiences in ‘processes of imagination’ and part of its value accrues from the experience of attending with others, from the mutual participation in a shared imaginary, and from the intensification of a social, in this case family, relationship. Peter Conrad conveys this point in his review of the director Michael Blakemore’s recent memoir, Stage Blood: ‘Theatre is evanescent, yet it can provide us with experiences so intense that we gratefully retain them for the rest of our lives […] it is the impregnable archive of our affections.’ This notion of spectatorship as an evolving ‘archive’ of affective intensities chimes with my own recollection of visiting the Alhambra as a child with my grandmother. I’m excited to see how far the findings of this AHRC project flesh out or challenge Conrad’s conjecture.