Sheer torture

Ever been to a ‘promenade performance’? Barmy, really. The audience is conducted through a makeshift theatre space — often a disused ironworks — where the show is performed in disjointed snatches amid atmospheric clutter. Invariably hopeless as drama, promenade shows can be revealing as social anthropology. They lay bare a secret that lies at the heart of theatrical life: actors loathe play-goers. Without a paying audience, all theatre is simply am-dram. And actors have a morbid fear of slipping into the underclass of voluntary performance. So they covertly resent ticket-buying audiences who alone have the power to convert an unpaid show-off into a self-regarding thesp, with his agent and his Spotlight listing and his drink problem. This latent hostility remains inactive most of the time but at a promenade show it emerges in plain view because the audience is at the performers’ mercy and the temptation to goad, humiliate and scare them becomes irresistible.