Booing

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 23, Issue 1, 2013, pages 11-15
Published online: 18 Mar 2013
DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2013.765102

Dan Rebellato

Department of Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway
University of London

Three cheers for booing! C’mon people, put your hands together for the little bit of theatre you love to hate!
It’s about time booing got a round of applause - usually booing is jeered off the stage. Plato in The Laws
observes a change from silently respectful audiences to the noisily opinionated audience of his own time,
referring to ‘catcalls and uncouth yelling’. These baying crowds, he suggests, by privileging their own pleasure over the purity and refinement of musical form, have established a ‘theatrocracy’, a mob relativism about artistic standards which will lead in turn to the disre-gard of laws and parental authority, a slow decline into moral chaos, and ‘a wretched life of endless misery’.

[...]

Booing isn’t empty, and even if it could be ejected from the theatre, which it can’t, should be cheered, because booing is a moment where the audience represents the theatre to itself by dramatizing and drawing attention to the fault-lines of performance. It is a kind of liminal activity that throws theatre into sharp relief and asks profound questions about performance. Booing troubles the edges of theatre. Is it a response prompted legitimately by performance and therefore contained within it? Or is it a disruption of performance from performance’s outside? Booing is theatre at its most philosophical and its most theatrical.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10486801.2013.765102