The Space

The physical size and position of the audience.

Is the audience seated or standing?

Is the audience moving?

In what direction does the audience focus?

What is the distance between audience and performance area?

Does the audience enter the performance area?

Is the Audience Seated or Standing?

The theatre's architectural structure, or no structure, determine if the audience or a portion of the audience is seated or standing, and factors in the kind of relationship between audience and production. The seated patron will naturally be more focused on the performance. By sitting down, his or her physical body is forced to face the performance. The fan-shaped late Hellenistic theatre structure is a keen example of very early theatre architects understanding this dynamic, and Western modern theatre structures continue the practice. The seating arrangement where the audience must face the performance clearly states to patrons that they are there to see a production. While social factors and a need to pack in the maximum number of patrons in a finite space helped determine the shape of the house resulting in a focus off of the production space, theatre artist/engineers have attempted to form the theatre structure to manipulate the audience to focus on the production since the beginning of theatre.

In theory, that would seem quite natural, but people being people, what theatre artist/engineers try to manipulate the audience to do and what the audience actually does are often two different things. Attending the theatre has always been a social event, and very, very often a patron will attend in order to be seen and nearly always be curious concerning who also is attending. The Teatro Farnese structure refocused the audience's attention to both the stage and the nobility as well as on each other. From the galleries of the Elizabethan theatres, the early prototype proscenium of Drury Lane, the eighteenth century Comédie Française, and into the more "lavish" modern type of proscenium theatre structures with box seats continue the trend to allow patrons to see patrons and thereby allowing an expression of theatre as a social event separate from the performance. The merging of performance and social event, of course, culminated in the eighteenth century when patrons could pay to literally sit on the stage in order to be seen by the rest of the audience. When Voltaire banished patrons from the performance space in 1759, theatre artist/engineers could reclaim the focus and return to using the space for the production. Eventually, theatre artist/engineers were able to dim the lights to help the audience differentiate between theatre as social event and theatre as performance art. In other words, theatre artist/engineers eventually were able to manipulate the focus by using the mechanism of the theatre structure rather than by the performance itself.

Nevertheless, the seated patron more easily focuses on the performance than the standing patron. A person standing has no dedicated personal space and therefore feels more free to move about. If the person is standing in the pit of an Elizabethan theatre and decides to move, because many people seated would be able to see that person move, then the focus more likely than not breaks from the performance space to the person in the pit. In this case, the demand of focus by the theatre company would have been tremendous, and probably helped lead to the excellence of the writings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others of the day.

And then there's the uncouth, the rude, the self-centered, the patron disliked by all modern theatre artists: the seated patron in a dimmed house who loudly stands and leaves during a performance. We can all hope he or she never returns, but, alas, too often does. Ultimately, audience members, like the tornado, the earthquake, the hurricane, are forces of nature beyond anyone's control. (Sigh.)