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Panto season is almost over and we've been booing the bad guys to our heart's content. But now that the curtain is falling on this signature sound until next Christmas, should we consider spotting more often? This is not a call for more of the antisocial chewing, swiping, swallowing, urinating or worse that has been making headlines lately. It is an exploration of the ancient - and possibly beautiful - tradition of collective dissent, expressed in the once all-powerful 'boo' of the audience.
In pantomime such protests have little incentive; they're so drenched in obliging bonhomie that we might as well clap. The more straightforward, inflammatory hooting of displeasure has been all but silenced, save for a few tuts or harrumphs. But for centuries, theater etiquette allowed whining and hissing in addition to cheering and whistling, all permitted within the grand debating chamber of the drama.
Epic plays were something completely new, an experiment. No one really knew how to respond to it
Booing is still present in stand-up, music concerts, opera and even the Cannes Film Festival - and it feels quite jarring when it happens. This may be because the material is considered sloppy, or because the action on stage is offensive. But booing can also be a sign of intolerance. Robert Hastie, artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, saw it in the opera. "Usually this is because the performer or performance has deigned to offer an alternative to an established, canonical interpretation. I know an actor [of colour] who worked in Germany, in a Wagner opera, who was booed."
Since ancient Greece, a powerful exchange between performer and spectator has been a cornerstone of the theater experience. Pamela Jikiemi, head of film, TV and audio at Rada, notes that when plays were the main form of entertainment, they were often so long that social interaction became unavoidable: "Audiences were encouraged to respond."
This was the case with Shakespeare's audiences, says Farah Karim-Cooper, a professor of Shakespeare studies at King's College London. A Shakespeare play, performed at the Globe in the Elizabethan era, was a pleasant occasion and the hall a brilliantly noisy place. As a relatively new industry, it had no prevailing social code. "These big, epic commercial plays," says Karim-Cooper, "were something completely new and an experiment. No one really knew how to respond to it."
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Although the audience often gave thunderous applause, they also did not shy away from conspicuous disapproval, albeit without overt hostility. Repertory companies, which performed a different piece every night, were guided by the audience's reaction: "If the audience didn't respond well to a new piece," says Karim-Cooper, "you wouldn't see that piece again. Programming was rooted in the public's tastes, because otherwise they wouldn't make money.
The fact that someone doesn't run away, but stays to fascinate - that tells its own story
This was no different from the 19th-century music hall, when "the audience was king," says Simon Sladen, senior curator of theater at the V&A and chairman of the UK Pantomime Association. Cheers or jeers became a litmus test, essential for the way managers structured an invoice. "If you wanted to take the person off stage, you would be booing - and people would have thrown stuff too. If you wanted them on, you would cheer even longer."
But as shows had longer runs, decisions were no longer as based on the audience's immediate reaction. Technological developments, including the arrival of electricity and improved lighting, ensured that the audience became calmer. "In Shakespeare's theater everything was lit so that the audience was visible," says Karim-Cooper. But when viewers were left in the dark, the dynamic changed. "It keeps the audience quiet. It might have trained them to be more reverent."
In this way we reach a modern audience, some of whom are more willing to express their dissatisfaction than others. Katerina Evangelatos - artistic director of the Athens Epidaurus festival, which celebrates ancient Greek drama - has seen audiences of up to 10,000 express their outrage at unconventional interpretations of canonical tragedies, loudly condemning them as sacrilege.
British-Tanzanian actor Lucian Msamati has had numerous first-hand experiences with booing, such as in Harare during a performance with his Zimbabwe-based theater company Over the Edge. This was more a case of playing to the wrong crowd, in the wrong venue, than a failure in performance. "It was our adaptation of the Complete Works of Shakespeare," he says, "which the Reduced Shakespeare Company had made a big hit with. We were the first company on the African continent to get the rights to do this. We adapted it for five actors and incorporated local jokes." But when his party took it to a music festival and an audience that had been drinking all day, there was open hostility. "Within about 30 seconds we were being booed and heckled. Things were thrown at us! In the end we had to leave the stage."
Even more puzzling, he remembers hearing cheers at a curtain call for Mourning Becomes Electra at the National Theater in 2003, in which he co-starred with Helen Mirren and Paul McGann. "One night it was very audible and I was curious why they were booing, because it is so rare. Maybe some audience members thought, "This is a great big show, with all these stars, and I'm not impressed - that's what I'm going to say." If someone doesn't walk away but makes an attempt to captivate at the end, it tells its own story."
If today's booing has any purpose, it is an affront to civic decorum, which can lead to a passive audience, indifference and even dishonesty. Msamati, for example, does not blame the viewers for their honest but hostile response. In locations where a less traditional or more culturally diverse audience is present, there is often a more talkative 'dialogue' between actors and audience. Msamati cites the uninhibited reactions of those who watched the Bush theatre's recent Red Pitch, saying it is never a turn-off for an actor to hear loud, sometimes disapproving exclamations when the audience is so enthralled the drama that their disbelief has completely disappeared. .
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While the public may not be as outspoken as they used to be, they have found other ways to express their displeasure. Actors report theatergoers reaching for their phones (or even, in the case of Andrew Scott's Hamlet, a laptop), which could be a passive-aggressive form of disapproval. They also talk about the aggressive nature of collective coughing. The most socially acceptable expression of disgust in the room seems to be walking away, sometimes en masse, which amounts to shouting with feet.
Angry, like there is a rare outbreak can divide the public. Sladen recalls a performance of Imagine This, a musical about the Holocaust set in the Warsaw Ghetto, which closed in early 2008. Cheers, he says, broke out during a scene in which characters put on a show on their way to extermination. . "That was the first time I'd ever been in an audience that really booed the unsavory nature [of a show], especially one of the songs where a character performed a stunning musical number while they were being killed. The cheering was visceral and actually quite scary."
But, he adds, there was a contingent who silenced their fellow audience members. "You had a weird audio soundtrack to the musical number - some people disapproved of what was happening on stage, others disapproved of the booing and tried to stop it. The clashing sounds became a statement of feeling."
The Globe must gird its loins at every free children's show
Perhaps it is cathartic when we are encouraged to boo - and perhaps this explains panto's enduring success. But Panto's boos have evolved. Though now purely boisterous, they once had a moral charge: The crowd cheered for the fairy godmother and booed the villain, Sladen says, in what could have been an extreme display of the polarities of good and evil. "The vocal contribution of the audience stimulated the moral lesson to be learned. But then we get a shift to family entertainment, where it becomes a standard convention. By showing interest when a bad guy shows up, you can build a shared community. And if you talk to stage villains today, they find that the more boos they get, the more the audience likes them.
It is also a sign, Hastie believes, that the audience has become wonderfully absorbed in the action and no longer sees the separation between character and actor. "I have experienced the best kind of cheering, which is in a pantomime or a show for young people, where they are so immersed in the show that they believe the fiction is real, or they invest in the fiction as if it were reality."
For Msamati, young people are the most astute and critical audience because they do not hide their instinctive reactions. "They can smell bullshit a mile away," says Msamati, "and they will say it." Karim-Cooper agrees. One program at the Globe offers free shows to children, many of whom have never been to the theater before. She says their noise and unfettered responses, both negative and positive, are the closest thing to an Elizabethan audience. "The Globe needs to gird its loins every time," she says. "Nobody taught them how to go to the theater, and the space doesn't teach you how to be in it. It's exciting."
