The rise of rowdy theatre audiences isn’t a surprise

The incident at Manchester’s Palace Theatre last Friday night at the close of a performance of the musical version of The Bodyguard – audience members singing loudly over the showstopping final number ‘I Will Always Love You’, being manhandled out by security, the show actually being stopped, and police called – has led to lots of chat about etiquette in auditoriums. We are told that rowdy audiences are becoming more of a problem, with a similar incident the week before at Bat Out Of Hell in London, and a new campaign from the theatre union Bectu against anti-social behaviour in theatres.

It occurs to me that these particular alarums and incidents came about not so much out of general rumbustiousness, but from a confusion on the part of the miscreants about what kind of show was being seen, and what kind of reaction was expected of them.