THE MOODS OF AUDIENCES

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 17 November 1913, Page 3

THE MOODS OF AUDIENCES

How little the separate members of an ordinary audience realise wnat an enormous difference they make to the actor, and on first nights to the fate of the play they are watching! Such is the reflection or Mr Laurence Irving, who describes in "T.P.'s Weekly" his impressions of audiences as viewed from behind the footlights. "It has always been a matter or interest to me," he says, "how during the run of a piece urn temper of an audience will vary from performance to performance, and it is a curious and sad fact that if an author wishes to show off his play to the best advantage, or an actor his own performance, so surely will ihe audience that night, above all others, be dull and unresponsive." Sometimes the temper of an audience will become completely transformed within the compass of three hours. Mr Irving relates how his first performance of "Typhoon" at the Haymarket was received. A few days before another play by the same author had proved a failure. "I am afraid we are in for an awful frost to-night," people were heard to say as they entered the theatre. And the curtain did rise on an icy frost. Not a smile, not a sound of applause greeted the best efforts of the actors. As Mrs Irving finished the comedy scene at the end of Act 1., all the consolation she could give her husband was, "Well, at any rate, they didn't cough." The play went on, still with the cold wall of silent disapproval before it, but suddenly—for apparently no reason —the whole attitude ©f the house changed. To the chilly silence succeeded an electric hush, "the deadly stillness which comes only with the intensely interested audience, a stillness which is broken by no cough, or sneeze, or scraping of the throatj or shuffling of the feet in the pit, and which broke out at the curtain of the act into that whole-hearted volley of applause which tells the actor his anxiety is over, and sends the author's hopes up to the highest heaven." In a similar way, Mr Irving says, he has known a play to start in a simmer of expectant enthusiasm, and then gradually but surely fizzle out, leaving the audience at the end of the last act in a state of depressed disappointment. These sudden changes in ir?ood do not seem to ho entirely dependent on the actual merits of the play or of the players. They are phenomena which ought fin interest all students of that very curious thing, the "psychology of the crowd."