O brave new world that hath such audiences in it….

First, in the afternoon, I went to Richmond to see a touring production of She Stoops to Conquer, and it was your traditional Wednesday matinee audience there – one I’ve previously applauded here for the kind of loyalty, turning out every week whatever is on, that seems to make it feel “virtually like a subscription house”. There is a downside, too: some are so at home that they treat it as a drop-off centre, in every sense – a woman across the aisle was snoring so loudly and so frequently that it kept interrupting the show for those around her. However, as I also previously wrote here, “I do, though, sometimes wonder if it can continue like this forever: will my generation be turning out every week when we’re 65+ in the same way? Or will the likes of Punchdrunk’s followers be installing stair lifts for us to visit their shows, too?”

One answer, of course, is for theatres to invest in building audiences for the future, and that’s one of the laudable aims of the annual NT Connections season of new one-act plays specially commissioned by the National to be written with young people in mind, on both sides of the footlights. Every year it culminates in a week-long festival on the South Bank in which youth theatre companies from around the country are invited to showcase each play on the stages of the Cottesloe and Olivier Theatres. The results are sometimes crude, but the energy in the room is always amazing: the audience during this week is typically like none you experience at other times of the year at the National, and it is like a massive celebratory party in which the young actors and audience cheer each other along.

But for the last two years, the National have had the clever idea – or rather director Paul Miller has, but then wasn’t available to actually do the first set of plays himself so Anna Mackmin directed them last year – to bring back three of the plays in a professional bill in the Cottesloe, which not only gives the plays further exposure but also continues the theatre’s commitment to attracting and developing younger audiences, since the plays address them so directly. Last night I caught the current triple bill of Roy Williams’ Baby Girl, Dennis Kelly’s DNA and Lin Coghlan’s The Miracle for myself at a “normal” performance, rather than the press one that happened when I was in America last, and it indeed looked like it was succeeding: the audience was heavily dominated by what seemed like school parties.

There were, of course, small pockets of the old – and older – audience, too, of National Theatre regulars and even an old(er) critic like me; as well as a younger person with a notebook sitting right beside me, with National Theatre actress Sian Thomas on the other side of her, so I am assuming was in a house seat as well. Though there was a gentle hum of occasional whispering as the play proceeds, it felt that the audience is attentive in my part of the house, but the bigger distraction turned out to be the mystery note taker next to me – I’ve been chastised myself in the past for my note-taking during a show causing a distraction to fellow audience members, but that wasn’t it.

Rather, it was her fierce and rumbling chest cough that kept erupting in great gusts of consumptive phlegm and sneezes; I couldn’t help noticing Sian trying to shield her face with a scarf whenever this happened. In the interval, I turned to the offender and asked her politely whether she thought she should actually be out. She looked at me stunned: what was the problem? I said it was clear she was very ill. “But I’m not contagious!”, she insisted. (How can she be sure?) “Maybe not – but you’re very distracting”, I replied.

During the interval, I found Sian and told her about the conversation I’d just had the person sitting in between us, and discovered that we both felt the same way, but found that as she is actually opening in a play at the National in a couple of weeks’ time (Fram, written by Thomas’ partner Tony Harrison), she can’t afford to get ill. We each noticed, too, there was one big laugh that the audience greeted a line with that we both missed, as it was entirely masked by one of the frequent coughing fits.

So I took myself off to the house manager to see if I could get re-seated. But someone else had got there first, having been distracted by people talking near them. The house manager had done so, but suggested that it might just have been kids actually enjoying the play and engaging with what they were seeing. You don’t, of course, want to be too prescriptive – there isn’t just one way to watch a play, and younger audiences might be more demonstrative than a more studied audience. So I moved into the seat that the other complainant had moved from. But it was out of the frying pan – or the flu zone – and into the fire.

The second play began, and I couldn’t see where the problem could have come from – there were lots of teenagers around me, its true, but none behaving particularly badly. But then, about fifteen minutes in, two young women arrived and re-claimed their seats in front of me – and their nearly-constant chatter and general jiggling about began, that was only alleviated when, another half an hour later, they stormed out of the theatre again. The peace was only temporary: they returned yet again a few minutes later, and one of them cracked open a can as she rowdily sat down, and kept up a constant commentary for the rest of the play.

There are several failures here; first of house management, who – aware of a problem in the theatre, since they’d already had to re-seat someone from this area – clearly didn’t monitor the situation closely enough, and on their second reappearance, could have taken steps not to re-admit them. An usher made one attempt to stop them talking, but they just ignored him. Then there’s the failure of an education system that clearly tries to take the horse to water, but doesn’t necessarily teach it how to drink. I spoke to a teacher from Southgate College that the offenders came from during the second interval, and she told me that the main offender was a particularly challenging and difficult student; but that she had now been spoken to and would no be returning for the third play.

Just as the third play was about to begin, however, she did; and the house manager finally intervened to insist that she leave, or the performance would not continue. I now saw for myself just how difficult this student was: she started mouthing off about wanting her f*ing £10 back, a refund that of course would not be forthcoming. Finally she was prevailed upon to go, but apparently the row continued into the foyer.

While it is interesting that she had, at least, paid her own money to be there – and hence her grievance at not being allowed to remain – one wonders what the point of building new audiences actually is when it’s this kind of audience member. But of course, I also mustn’t allow a couple of rotten apples spoil the entire harvest; and I always try to remember on such occasions that it was going to the theatre as part of a school trip when I was about 14 that made me into what I am today, professionally as well as personally.

However, just as there are challenging students there’s also a bigger challenge for theatres and teachers alike in managing them so that they don’t overwhelm and disrupt the experience for everyone else. Last November a performance I saw at the Young Vic of The Brothers Size was comprehensively ruined by the constant chatter throughout the house – even the onstage musician kept getting up out of his seat to furiously stare out the miscreants.

And talking to the director of last night’s show Paul Miller (himself a sometimes regular blogger though he’s sadly not posted anything since the end of January – no doubt he’s had his hands full with directing this triple bill!) briefly afterwards, he told me that the best audiences for the show are ones where it is split into equal proportions of school parties, younger individual audience members, and National Theatre regulars and other adults. Last night was unevenly weighted towards school parties, and it created an imbalance.

It was also, of course, one of the few performances in the rep where all three plays are given – and was one of the reasons I chose it – but it made it an unusually long one for that audience to engage with: we were there for three and a half hours all told. But at least two of the three plays (which happened, of course, to be the first two) are so good that it would have gone by in a flash, if it hadn’t been quite so frustrating to be there in the first place.