‘You Say Something’: Audience Participation and The Author

Abstract

This short essay considers Tim Crouch's play The Author in relation to recent debates about audience participation, and the ways in which audience engagement is solicited and/or manipulated by different theatrical and dramaturgical strategies. It proposes that The Author provides an exemplary instance of an ethically consistent approach to the risks and potentials involved inopening a dialogue with audience members.

Notes

Lyn Gardner (2006) ‘There is something stirring …', Programme Notes: Case Studies for Locating Experimental Theatre, ed. by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2007), pp. 10–17 (p. 12).

Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Sophie Nield, ‘The Rise of the Character called Spectator’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18 (Winter 2008), 531–44.

Ibid,, p. 533. Nield cites Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ibid., p. 534.

Ibid., p. 535.

See Kurt Lancaster, ‘When Spectators Become Performers: Contemporary Performance-Entertainments Meet the Needs of an “Unsettled” Audience’, Journal of Popular Culture, 38 (Winter 1997), 75–88.

Tim Crouch in Helen Freshwater, ‘The Author: Tim Crouch in Conversation with Helen Freshwater’, Performing Ethos, 1 (Summer 2011), 181–95 (p. 185).

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jepbcott, rev. edn by Eric Dunning and others (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

Nield, ‘The Rise …', p. 533.

Tim Crouch, The Author (London: Oberon Books, 2009), p. 17.

Ibid., p. 17.

Ibid., p. 17.

Ibid., p. 17.

Ibid., p. 21.

Ibid., p. 21.

Ibid., p. 23.