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Contemporary Theatre Review

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You Say Something: Audience Participation and The

Author
Helen Freshwater
Published online: 17 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Helen Freshwater (2011) You Say Something: Audience Participation and The Author , Contemporary
Theatre Review, 21:4, 405-409, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2011.610308
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2011.610308

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Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 21(4), 2011, 405 409

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Helen Freshwater

Are theatre audiences in the UK eager to

participate in performance, or desperate to
avoid the exposure and potential embarrassment threatened by invitations to participate?
According to critic Lyn Gardner, its the
former. Writing in 2007 in the collection
Programme Notes, she argued that the twentyfirst century has seen a revolution in theatrical
form in the UK, and with it an increased
appetite amongst audiences for theatre which
provides opportunities for audience participation. For her, experiences of interactive work
can be addictive, as she argues:
The scripted play seems tame once the
audience has tasted this power and the
possibility of interaction. We are no longer
content to sit quietly in our seats when we
can storm the stages. Once we have learned
this new theatrical vocabulary, we want more
opportunities to hear it and speak it, we no
longer find it satisfying merely to stick to
other peoples scripts.1
1. Lyn Gardner There is something stirring . . ., Programme
Notes: Case Studies for Locating Experimental Theatre, ed. by

In 2008 I spent many hours thinking about

my recent experiences of audience participation and performance, and wondering whether
they offered the kind of pleasures and opportunities Gardners piece proposed. As readers
of my book Theatre & Audience will know, I
channelled these thoughts into a reading of
theatrical encounters between performers and
audiences in European and North American
theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The book describes a range of
performances which have sought to generate
active audience involvement from Brechts
Epic Theatre to The Blue Man Group and
asks a series of questions about continuing
belief in theatres potential to influence, impact
and transform. I concluded that much of what
now presents itself as participation in contemporary performance is really nothing of the sort.
Performances which seem to be offering
audiences the chance to make a creative contribution only give them the choice of option A
or option B or the opportunity to give
Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine (London: Live Art
Development Agency, 2007), pp. 1017 (p. 12).

Helen Freshwater, Lecturer in Theatre Studies, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle
University, Percy Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom. Email: helen.freshwater@newcastle.ac.uk
Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online
2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2011.610308

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responses which are clearly scripted by social

and cultural convention. These strategies are as
disappointing and mendacious, in their own
way, as governmental consultation exercises
which simply provide an illusion of public
dialogue whilst functioning to legitimate decisions taken by the authorities.2
Others have expressed their ambivalence
about the value and nature of the participation being offered in contemporary performance. Sophie Nields reflection on The Rise
of the Character called Spectator in the
immersive work being produced by Shunt,
Punchdrunk and Goat and Monkey (which
appeared in CTRs Backpages in 2008)
examines the discomfort, unease and embarrassment which she finds these pieces produce.3 Her article points out the gap between
artistic aspirations to give audiences experiences of freedom, exploration and adventure,
and the careful stage management of both
the environment in which these explorations
occur and the rules which delimit the
spectators interactions with them. Invoking
Nicholas Ridouts discussion of moments
when performers address individual audience
members directly in Stage Fright, Animals
and Other Theatrical Problems, she concurs
that that such moments effectively require
the annihilation of the self, leaving audience
members playing the limited role of the
anonymous, impersonal Spectator.4 She
questions whether Punchdrunks practice of
requiring audience members to wear masks
enhances this effect, asking,
Could the hood, the mask, the enforced
anonymity, perhaps not be merely to give the
audience the illusion of freedom? Does it not
also continue to protect the theatre from
having to see us seeing it, to watch itself be
watched.5

2. Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
3. Sophie Nield, The Rise of the Character called Spectator,
Contemporary Theatre Review, 18 (Winter 2008), 53144.
4. Ibid,, p. 533. Nield cites Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright,
Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5. Ibid., p. 534.

She argues that although the practice may

protect performers from meeting the gaze of
the individual spectator thus maintaining
the distance between watcher and watched
which is often considered to be integral to the
theatrical encounter it leaves spectators
struggling to reconcile the disjunction between the way in which these performances
produce them as a stock character, Spectator,
and the complexity of their own responses.
She concludes that although the performances
appear to construct the audience as cipher,
ghost or imaginary screen,
we do not necessarily appear so to ourselves
instead, without the protective apparatus of
characterisation, rehearsal, fictive otherness,
perhaps we risk staring into the black hole of
the theatre itself, mute, stage-affrighted,
awaking to the actors nightmare of being
on the stage, and not knowing the play.6

This discussion seemed particularly pertinent as I sat in the audience for The Author at
the Royal Court in October 2009. The play
unpacks the ethical issues raised by theatre
which explores and represents extreme violence. It portrays the effect that a fictional
Royal Court production has upon its playwright, its cast and an audience member. The
specifics of this play-within-a-play which
appears to focus upon the brutal sexual abuse
visited upon a young woman by her father
are never established, but the damage that
creating and witnessing it has done becomes
increasingly clear as the show unfolds. The
piece requires audiences to consider their own
responses as it invites them to contemplate
rape, suicide, paedophilia and decapitation. It
asks them to reflect upon the relationship
between looking and doing, and whether
one should watch spectacles of suffering
when there is no possibility of making a direct
intervention.
Individualised direct address, and audience
responses to it, are central to this piece.
During it, the cast of four sit amongst the
audience, who occupy two banks of steeply
6. Ibid., p. 535.

raked seating facing each other in an otherwise

empty studio. Before the scripted show begins,
the performers engage the people around
them in friendly, convivial conversation.
Names, occupations and interests are gently
drawn out and, on both occasions I have seen
it, the space has buzzed with anticipatory
chatter as the audience wait for the show to
start. Theres no masking, no anonymity.
Rather than undergoing an annihilation of
the self, the spectator is actively encouraged
to name and represent themselves as an
individual. There are no phantoms here, no
shadowy presences or unseen eyes. Spectators
are invited to bring the specific details of their

On the night I first saw the show at the

Royal Court, it was received politely. But it
went on to have a rougher ride as it toured,
with some audiences members apparently
finding its form and the questions it is asking
almost too much to bear. I know that Tim
and some of the company have found being
on the sharp end of the kinds of refusal and
intervention the piece has provoked very
difficult at times. When I interviewed Tim
in 2010, he described the experience of
playing to particularly volatile audiences at
the Edinburgh festival as a fucking nightmare.8 But for me, in the position of
spectator, the strength of these responses is

Image 1 The Author: Audience and Esther Smith (standing). Photo: Stephen Cummiskey.

lives and identities to the conversation. The

cast appear to be similarly unmasked, with
characters named after the performers who
play them, who wear their own clothes rather
than costume. Far from protecting themselves
from the individual audience members gaze,
these performers actively seek it out. So, there
is little distance or theatrical illusion in
evidence at least at first. But confusion
about the role one is expected to perform as a
spectator, and the social embarrassment that
can be produced by direct address, are key to
the effects The Author has produced amongst
audiences. It can also, I think, be seen as a
response to some of the more glib assertions
that are made about the link between audience
participation and freedom or agency.7
7. See Kurt Lancaster, When Spectators Become Performers:
Contemporary Performance-Entertainments Meet the

fascinating. And they leave me with a question: what is it about the show that generates
such outrage? It would be easy to imagine
that it is the content that upsets audiences.
But no one can be offended by what they are
actually required to watch. Theres no spectacle here: the piece is all tell and (almost) no
show. Whats more, any audience member
would find it hard to claim that they hadnt
been warned that the show contains disturbing material, given the clear statements to
this effect provided by the company and
venues on tickets and publicity. Nevertheless,
many people who see The Author seem to
Needs of an Unsettled Audience, Journal of Popular
Culture, 38 (Winter 1997), 7588.
8. Tim Crouch in Helen Freshwater, The Author: Tim Crouch
in Conversation with Helen Freshwater, Performing Ethos, 1
(Summer 2011), 18195 (p. 185).

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find it upsetting, disturbing, distressing even.

Why?
Here I want to return to Lyn Gardners
celebration of the idea that interactive, participative work offers a new theatrical vocabulary, and that audiences no longer find it
satisfying [. . .] to stick to other peoples
scripts once they have been introduced to it.
This assertion might prompt readers to remind
themselves that the scripts audiences and
performers are following in the theatre are
not, of course, only ones that appear on the
page. Much interactive theatre depends upon
our familiarity with a vast network of unwritten scripts and ingrained social habitus which
sociologist Norbert Elias describes in The
Civilising Process.9 Much of it works because
it depends upon audience members observing
the unspoken rules of social interaction the
rituals and conventions which frame our
everyday exchanges, as well as our understanding of the conventions which govern
appropriate behaviour in a theatre. As Nield
observes, We try to help the show. We try to
play along. We do our best.10
The trouble for audiences of The Author is
that the piece plays with and confounds our
desire to play along. Unlike some of
Crouchs earlier plays, such as An Oak Tree
(2005) and ENGLAND (2007), it does not
begin with a helpful guide to the experience.
Audience members are left to make up their
own minds about the status of what theyre
seeing and hearing. It also sends out conflicting signals about the kind of participation that
is appropriate, and the roles audience members
should be adopting within the show. The easy,
friendly, unthreatening conversations which
the performers initiate in the minutes before
the scripted work begins set up an expectation
of dialogue, interaction and exchange. But as
the theatre-loving character originally played
by Adrian Howells, and then by Chris Goode,
starts to deliver his lines, addressing the
audience as a whole, the questions he is asking
seem, at first, to be rhetorical: This is great,
9. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund
Jepbcott, rev. edn by Eric Dunning and others (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000).
10. Nield, The Rise . . ., p. 533.

isnt this great? and then, as he continues,

they shift back to being genuine enquiries, as
he asks some of the people sitting around him
to offer their names: Im Adrian and you are?
Hello! Whats your name?11
On the occasions I saw the show, the social
pressure to be polite and agreeable worked to
generate responses to these enquiries. Indeed,
the piece is dependent upon these responses,
and it assumes that it will produce them. As
the script notes, the many underscored blanks
which it contains represent the names of any
number of audience members that ADRIAN
has effortlessly and gracefully elicited and
learned. We should get to know quite a few
names over the course of the play.12 Crouch can
make this confident assertion because to refuse
to offer your name in these circumstances
would seem unhelpful, churlish or just plain
rude. The response of Adrian/Chris to being
given these names, however, seems to tease
audiences with the threat of humiliating,
embarrassing exposure of being made
subject to the gaze of the audience, and an
explicitly objectifying and evaluative gaze, at
that: Youre beautiful! Isnt _______ beautiful? Everyone?13 So, its little surprise that
when, a few moments later, the character
pauses and says cheerfully: Ill shut up. Ill
stop. Someone else go!,14 audience members
are unlikely to take him up on his offer, and
that this silence usually remains when his
request is reiterated more reproachfully, a
minute or two into the show. It is repeated
by Adrian/Chris for the last time in response
to the departure of what the script refers to
as an audience member,15 and even Chris
Goodes relatively mild interpretation of the
scripts strong YOU FUCKING SAY SOMETHING!!! communicated the characters
frustration and disappointment.16
The way in which this invitation is made first
cheerfully, then critically, and finally furiously,
is clearly a challenge. The character has shifted
11. Tim Crouch, The Author (London: Oberon Books, 2009),
p. 17.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13. Ibid., p. 17.
14. Ibid., p. 17.
15. Ibid., p. 21.
16. Ibid., p. 21.

suddenly from appearing friendly and chatty to

bitter and angry. And as the house lights go
out and music plays after this outburst, the
invitation you say something then, sits
there, no longer encouraging a contribution,
but admonishing the deserting audience
member and the rest of the audience, by
implication for failing to take it up. It is not
hard to see how members of the audience
who are unclear about what their role is
whether what they are watching is scripted,
or improvised, and whether they are expected
to be saying something or not may have
found this hard. So the anger amongst
audience members, I think, is partly a
product of the fact that they dont know
which social script to follow. Whats more, as
the piece unfolds, it becomes clear that the
decision to sit in silence when asked direct
questions such as Tims Is it OK if I carry
on? as he describes the curves of the young
womans body and imagines having sex with
her places audience members in a position
of profoundly compromised complicity; but
also that the show will continue regardless of
responses to these questions.17
Readers of Theatre & Audience will know
that despite my scepticism about some of the
claims made about the liberating effects of
participatory performance, I also think that
there are hopeful signs that contemporary

17. Ibid., p. 23.

theatre is now providing opportunities for more

meaningful forms of audience participation.
For me, this hope resides in companies and
performers which have learned to trust audiences, offering them real choices and accepting
that genuine participation has risks as well as
potentials: that it involves vulnerability on the
part of performers and participants, as both
parties open themselves to unexpected experiences and outcomes. Key to this, for me, is the
need for work which gives participants the
space to reflect upon the limitations of creative
or political agency. The Author is a prime
example of this kind of work. The deliberately
disturbing games that the piece plays with its
audiences make the act of spectatorship a selfconscious one, as it shows its audiences that
not all experiences of participation are positive,
requiring them to confront the limitations,
disappointments and frustrations that are
surely integral to any genuinely participatory
experience. It also reminds audience members
of the real choices they have as theatre-goers.
It reminds them that they can leave, and that
the convention of respectful silence is just that:
a convention. As a consequence the performers who sat amongst the many different
audiences for this extraordinary work know,
much better than most, the risks and potentials involved in opening a dialogue with
individual audience members.

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