IMAGINE I’m wearing a black skirt and a shiny button tunic, my hair has a Lana Turner curl and I’m standing in the dark holding a heavy flashlight.
Got it? Good. Now I should point out this isn’t an indicator of cross-dressing preference, more a figurative way of suggesting a return to the values of the Sixties cinema usherette.
Why? Our world is calling out for them.
This week, an Aberdeen teenager was punched in the face by a fleeing assailant in a movie theatre, the schoolboy having thrown popcorn around. Certainly, the punishment in no way fitted the crime, but you just know had an usherette been in attendance that situation would never have happened.
What the episode highlights however is that we’re living in a world where people don’t give a bucket of popcorn for those around them.
Last week at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow, a couple in their thirties spoke (loudly) for the entire two hours of urban witchcraft play Six Black Candles. Others stared hard at them by way of asking them to desist. The couple didn’t read the signs. (Their blind ignorance suggests they couldn’t even read.)
It wasn’t too long ago a friend watched two people enjoy a fish supper in Edinburgh. Nothing wrong with that, except the fish suppers were swallowed during the performance of Mamma Mia! And given the locale, this strongly suggests the fish tea was condimented with both vinegar and brown sauce. Way too strong for those around to bear.
Those on the stage also have a lot to contend with. The nation’s favourite tear duct opener Adele recently berated one of her own fans who stood for the length of a concert with video phone in hand.
During a West End theatre run of (ironically) Speaking In Tongues, Harry Potter star Ian Hart was performing a thoughtful soliloquy only to become enraged, (allegedly,) when one man talked right through his performance. Hart, say observers, lost the plot and launched himself from the stage at the culprit.
A little dramatic perhaps, but we’re all bored with the low boredom threshold culture, those who won’t sit still, who can’t process more than Twitter’s 140 character allocation.
We’re all fed up with the clickbait mentality, those whose brains constantly fast forward the pictures in their minds and as a result, can’t cope with a night at the pictures.
It’s easy to blame the young. But in defence, middle-aged parents don’t want to look or act their age these days, and social responsibility isn’t being handed down.
And older generations are often guilty of failing to consider the crowd. But what’s the answer? A couple of years back a Kentucky man was tasered by police after he refused to put down his smart phone in the cinema. A bit severe, perhaps.
In these cost-saving days, the usherette has been consigned to the dustbins of history, like Kia Ora orange drinks and Mivvi ice creams. Yet, we need to resurrect that spirit because irritating behaviour has become the norm. No one is shining the light of social responsibility in the face of the miscreants.
It’s left to the public. In a survey for What’sOnStage magazine, an incredible 42 per cent of audience members said they had reprimanded others for using their phone during the performance.
Now, there are many out there who will recall the usherette could be a little severe at times, beaming the searchlight of opprobrium at the merest rustle of a crisp poke, the loud-ish slurp through the straw. It’s also true they could induce the 15 year-old male face to turn the colour of Vimto.
Once (and only once) when, with his date in the back row of the Kelburne Cinema in Paisley, a young man (okay, me) allowed a curious hand to wander the wrong side of a soft cheesecloth blouse, he was suddenly stunned when the searching torchlight illuminated those guilty fingers, followed by the loud, stern warning; “Behave yersel!”
But the calm, unquestionable authority of the usherette, those de facto parents who dished out reproval when required is gone. And if parents aren’t teaching auditorium behaviour, then it’s down to schools. My eleven year-old chum James is currently being schooled in Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies. Could subjects such as this be the perfect platform to discuss social boundaries, to invoke the tasks and skills of The Usherette?
We need to curb the rudeness and crassness that can occur in our theatres, the type of which once appeared in the Pavilion Theatre during a run of my own comedy (allegedly) play, Hacked Off. In the big build up to the end of the first half, a moment demanding total attention, a phone went off. Loudly. I was incensed.
And the clown who owned it let it ring, and ring, and the entire audience scanned the stalls for the culprit. It was only when I could contain my anger the rational head returned and I realised the ringing was coming from my own jacket pocket.
Usherettes would never have allowed phones in the first place.
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