When Audience Participation Goes Too Far

So many of this country's woes can be blamed on lust for land. Colonialism, rack-renting, partitionism. The church's celibacy decree ensured tracts of its real estate would never be subdivided through marriage and children, but bred generations of sexually frustrated eunuchs, sadists and paedophiles. A different kind of land-grab mania reared its ugly head in the past decade: cabals of property moguls, politicos and bankers cutting illuminati deals on the golf course, selling Ireland by the pound.

John B. Keane's The Field was first performed in the Olympia in 1965. Based on a true-life murder that took place in North Kerry in the 1950s, it gave us one of the titans of Irish theatre, the Bull McCabe, a man driven to murder by the desire to possess the field he'd tended for five years, and when the deed was done, intimidated the village into a conspiracy of silence.
Jim Sheridan's 1990 film extended the play into an Oedipal tragedy that left Richard Harris's Bull battling the waves, his covenant with the land sealed by his son's blood.
The current version of the play running at the Olympia, directed by Joe Dowling, returns the story to its roots. Brian Dennehy, a veteran film and TV actor who has distinguished himself in stage productions of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into the Night and Miller's Death Of A Salesman, plays the Bull as a mumbling hulk of a man. Derbhle Crotty steals the play from under his nose, delivering an outstanding turn as Mamie, the bored wife of the auctioneer Flanagan, and beleaguered mother of nine. It's an assured production. The sets are stark but handsome, the staging sure and unfussy, and the ensemble lurches confidently from comedy to melodrama.
But the performance I saw was spoiled for reasons that had nothing to do with the production. I'm no drama snob – I was in my thirties before I set foot inside a theatre. But never have I encountered a more insensitive (scratch that, ignorant) audience than the one that attended the Olympia on Thursday January 20. There was barely a line in the play that wasn't obscured by coughs and splutters (fits that mysteriously subsided during the interval – do such folk save up their phlegmatic expostulations for public events?). Mobile phones went off at least half a dozen times, not counting the ones set to vibrate. Certain of the audience in the row behind me felt compelled to finish the actors' lines, or add their own commentary, as if they were sat at home watching Coronation Street. By the end of the play I was fit to be tied.
Irish theatre productions depend on marquee names like Alan Rickman, Stockard Channing and Brian Dennehy to attract a crowd that wouldn't normally venture out to the Gaiety, the Abbey or the Olympia. A pity so many of these tourists leave their manners at home.