One of the most scary, yet joyous aspects of live theatre is the unpredictability of the audience. Before the opening of a show, the director and actors often have no idea how it is going to be received by the public. Sections that seemed riotously funny in rehearsal often evoke nothing more than a glum silence; yet stray, innocuous, throwaway lines elicit uproarious laughter. Audience reactions also vary from night to night, city to city. Broadway ‘surefire’ hits have been known to close within a week. Tiny, experimental pieces that miraculously ‘click’ sometimes run for years.In the film industry, where the financial outlay is stupendous, the stakes get higher. A flop may result in the monetary ruin of the backers, and the loss of a career for an actor. Conversely, the unexpected success of a small, indy film often catapults an obscure director and actors to megafame. Audience reaction seem to seep into the actors’ private lives. In the minds of the less discerning members of the public, the performers’ offscreen personalities and the roles they play tend to merge. Famous villians have been spat upon, heroes applauded, and comedians are expected to be hysterically funny every moment of their waking lives. The audience-actor relationship has always been a strange and amusing one. In Elmer the Great, comedian Joe E Brown drank a cup of coffee with a spoon in it. After five or six unsuccessful attempts, where the spoon kept hitting his eye, he bent the spoon, put it back in the cup, and then drank the coffee successfully. Brown thought it a good gag, till he began receiving hundreds of letters from angry parents complaining that, after their kids had seen the movie, they didn’t have a straight spoon in the house. Brown was puzzled by another letter. “The other day me and another fellow got into an argument,†it ran. “He said someone else was the world’s greatest comedian, and I said you were. We came to blows and I broke my arm. Could you please reimburse my medical expenses, as I was fighting for you?â€One day, as Edward G Robinson, star of several gangster films, came out of a movie theatre, an elderly woman with a little boy in tow rushed upto him, and exclaimed, “I’m glad I have this opportunity of telling you to your face what a bad influence your pictures have had on our young people!†“What makes you think so?†asked Robinson. “I ought to know,†she said firmly. “I’ve taken my grandson to see your last picture eight times.†Both performances and films can have the strangest of repercussions. Audiences laughed so hard at Chaplin comedies (according to a Photoplay article) that the vibrations loosened the bolts on seats in the movie theatres, and managers had to have them tightened up periodically. At a sneak preview of Sylvia Scarlett, which Katherine Hepburn herself attended, it quickly became clear that her latest film was a disaster. People began to leave in droves. Hepburn escaped to the ladies’ room, where she found a woman lying in a dead faint. “My God,†gasped Hepburn. “The picture has killed her!†In 1960, Bette Davis and her husband toured the country doing readings of Carl Sandburg’s poems. In one small town, two elderly sisters, avid fans of Davis, sat through the performance in a state of high excitement. Suddenly one of the women put her hand to her chest, and died of a heart attack. As she was being taken out of the theatre, her sister refused to go with her, and begged Davis to continue. At the end of the performance, Davis invited the woman on stage. “I adored the performance,†the woman said. “And my sister would have too, if she hadn’t died two hours ago.†Shortly after the release of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller in which Janet Leigh is murdered in the shower, a man wrote to the director to say that ever since seeing the movie, his wife had been afraid to shower. He stated that he was fed up with an unwashed wife, and wanted suggestions as to what to do. Sir Hitchcock wrote back, “Have you considered sending your wife to the dry cleaner?†(Sohrab Ardeshir is a theatre actor)
