Visiting the Theatre Royal in Newcastle-upon-Tyne last night to see the new tour of Aspects of Love was a series of aspects of irritation – none of them, fortunately, related to the production itself. The aggravations began at the box office, who didn’t seem to have my ticket – though it turned out it was there all along, for some reason (and this box office is not alone in this), the moment they are faced with a booking that isn’t being collected with a credit card, they simply fail to look for it, make a call somewhere else in the building, then finally print out another ticket (that wasn’t booked for me) instead. They also express surprise when I ask for a programme – it’s as if they’ve never seen a critic – and sent me on my frustrated way. When I told the company manager of the problems I’d had, he tried to intervene, and the box office offered him an even worse seat for me in the back row of the dress circle. Finally, moments before the show started, someone else in the box office found the ticket I’d been booked into all along, the company manager found me, and I was seated – in the middle of a row in the middle of the dress circle.
That wasn’t, in itself, a problem – the view was fine – but the cramped conditions (and not having a guest with me) meant that I was squeezed in the midst of paying customers. At the interval, one of them – who wasn’t, in fact, one of the people seated on either side of me – came up to me to complain: she’d paid £30 for her ticket, and the fact that I was writing notes was very distracting! When I spoke to the company manager once again trying to get re-seated, he told me that the show’s assistant director – seated in between other production personnel – had had a similar complaint levied against him when he was taking notes last week. Obviously these Newcastle audiences were more curious about their fellow audience members’ activities than what is going on the stage. Yet no complaint was made last night against another audience member who had a giant bag of sweets on her lap nearby, and seemed to dip into it throughout the first act constantly, oblivious of the disruption she was causing.
I am often acutely frustrated by behaviour like this, so am wary of being the source of distraction myself. I make sure that I write notes as discreetly as possible, and I certainly don’t use a pen that lights up or the glow of my mobile phone, as I’ve seen people reading their programmes by, to do so. Nor, as one or two of my colleagues sometimes do, do I use a pencil – I have often sat in front of critics listening to the gentle scratchings of their pencils against paper.
But all of this palls in comparison to the absurd situation at the opening night of the Take That musical, Never Forget, in Manchester a few weeks ago, when the producers – for reasons best known only to themselves – chose that night to actually film the entire show. With camera cranes swooping dangerously over the stalls, they also bathed the auditorium in the purple glow of additional lighting to make sure that the audience too was lit and visible to the cameras. I actually had to watch parts of the show with my programme held up to the right side of my face to stop the irritating glow; and far from being able to judge the show in the best light, in every sense, the entire experience was compromised. Producers, you would think, would like to have their show given its best shot of success with critics, but here – in trying to get the best shot for the cameras – those priorities were ignored. If I’d been a paying customer, I’d have been even more furious. As it is, I simply couldn’t believe that they were prepared to compromise their own show in this way.
