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Article Excerpt
The sounds that audiences make, of laughing, booing, or cheers, can be heard in early-twentieth-century novels and periodicals. There is also the rustling of dresses and playbills, the shuffling of feet, coughing, and conversation. This era of changing styles and tastes is the age of the phonograph, the telephone, and recorded sound. Texts reflect how mediated sound unfolded in a new period of transmission and reproduction of sound, the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Much has been written about the innovations of the phonograph, the telephone, and the sound recording in the context of the emergence of sound movies. Less has been said about what audiences heard and how they adjusted to these changes in their aural world. Literary texts, reviews in periodicals, and the journals of attendees offer us some general insight into fin de siecle audiences and how their theatrical and concert worlds sounded. These texts reveal that audiences were crucial participants at a variety of performance venues as the modern era began. We can see in them an emerging difference between the Victorian and the modern that reflects a change in the aural world.
This essay explores the social expression of sound by considering the fin de siecle audience. Michael Booth has pointed out that "when society changes, the theatre changes" ("Soldiers" 57). By looking at how technology interacted with the expansion and changes of the turn-of-the-century audience, the intention here is to consider how audiences "performed" in live performance venues. I look at the collective responses and habits of audiences as they were portrayed in newspaper reviews, in fiction, and in journals. I point to the turn-of-the-century audience's fascination with the sound of the human voice, a fascination expressed by public interest in the gramophone and in elocution. Audiences in London and New York adapted to the new media of the phonograph, the telephone, and sound in motion pictures. Class, gender, and ethnicity intersected in these theatres, as well as in society, and new voices began to sound themselves in public. This was a time of the gradual emergence of formerly suppressed voices: new women's voices, the heteroglossia of voices from the Empire, and the voices of working-class literacy.
To begin, let us go back to the 1890s. The theatre then was a social centre; there was much conversation and movement. Many sounds in a British music hall were not a direct reaction to what was occurring on the stage. Whistles and clacks from the audience were common. People sitting next to each other would tell each other what they might have missed onstage. There were fragmented, delayed responses and missed lines. The print programs the audience held could be read alongside the action occurring onstage. Booklets, which could be easily read, cued the audience, letting them know the dialogue and action that would unfold on the stage. These auditoriums were lit, not darkened as we have our auditoriums today during performances. The audience was no longer easily divided by class, and audience participation occurred throughout the house. One heard sound everywhere at the theatre and opera. Audiences were energetic, vociferous, and active: they too performed. The social ritual of watching a show was quite auditory.
One restless and impatient audience at Queen's Hall can be heard in Bernard Shaw's diary entry of 13 March 1894: "I looked in at a charity concert [...] and found a band of Coldstream Guards desperately playing one selection after another to keep the audience amused until the arrival of the artists who were first on the program" (Diaries 1016). Shaw later observed that a few attendees, whom he called the "gods of the gallery," had been disrupting performances at the Globe Theatre since January 1895. In the Saturday Review of 6 March 1897, his article "Gallery Rowdyism" described this: "For some time past the gods have been making themselves a more and more insufferable nuisance. The worry of attending first nights has been mercilessly intensified by the horrible noises they offer as British cheers" (Diaries 1158-59). Shaw's article appealed for civility in the theatre. He wrote, "I do not object to a cheer that has the unmistakable depth and solidity of tone that come only from a genuine ebullition of enthusiasm, but this underbred, heartless, incontinent, wide-mouthed, slack-fibred, brainless bawling is wearisome and disgusting beyond endurance." It "provokes furious opposition," creating tension in the theatre, he wrote. Soon "everyone boos at everybody and everything. This of course only creates two uproars, each stimulating the other to redoubled obstreperousness, where formerly there was but one" (Drama 794). Clapping is "far more expressive than shouting," he added; "let us at least express ourselves humanly and sensibly" (797).
Express themselves audiences certainly did. Shaw at times reflected upon audience responses to his plays. On 4 July 1897, he reported to actress Ellen Terry that he had seen a production of The Man of Destiny. He describes a self-conscious audience: "The applause at the end--half good nature to the actors, half a perplexed tribute to my reputation--was like a groan: it was more pathetic by far than a vigorous hooting would have been.[...] Fortunately the audience was humble in its agony, and mutely respected Napoleon for saying things they could not understand. It would even make a mouse like attempt to show its appreciation now & then, but each time it shrunk back lest it should be taking seriously something that was perhaps one of my dazzling jokes" (Collected 779). Playwright Alfred Sutro recalls the beginning of Act 3 in the first performance of Shaw's Major Barbara:
The curtain rose on an audience that had been hugely entertained, that was happily and confidently expectant; but, alas, there were streams, rivers, cataracts of talk, talk that caught us up, engulfed us and drowned us; the intense boredom in front seemed to infect the actors on the stage, and a little fluffiness on the part of the principal, the unending talker, did not help matters. Never was the end of a play received with more rapturous relief, but, as the audience filed out, the brilliance of the first two acts was held to atone, in some measure, for the spate of talk that had flooded the last one. (117-18)
Shaw's and Sutro's comments reflect the restlessness of audiences: their emotional reactions, collective connection, and socially conditioned habits. Audiences, then as now, communicated emotion rhythmically, sometimes clapping in tandem. An audience's collective response is a result of neural factors as well as socially conditioned patterns of behaviour. An example of socially conditioned behaviour is the clapping of hands sounding applause, which today follows a performance of classical music; audiences withhold their...
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