Warning: i’ve got zero tolerance for the zero tolerance brigade

As even theatre ushers wear bodycams to create a ‘safe space’...

Currently wowing theatre audiences in london is a revival of Michael Frayn’s genius farce-within-a-farce, noises Off. there are other shows all over the country where the slapstick is perfect and the acting uproariously funny.

Sold-out productions such as the tina turner Musical and Dirty Dancing invite audiences onto their feet, to join in the songs with over-excited shrieks. Indeed, that is the very reaction that theatre directors dream about. So why are the killjoys now on patrol? If it hadn’t been mid-July, I would have thought that one of yesterday’s newspaper reports might have been an April Fool: staff at several london theatres now wear ‘ bodycams’ that film audiences, ensuring they behave with decorum. But the story is true — how very sad. According to the Society of london theatre, the behaviour of theatregoers has declined so markedly that ushers are recording so- called aggressive incidents.

the organisation’s ‘ head of risk and safety’ says: ‘ When you mix alcohol with the theatre environment, that can exacerbate situations, and we want to try to manage that before it becomes a major problem within our industry.’

What exactly is this terrible new threat that the great playhouses of the West end are suddenly facing?

Are audiences at Alan Bennett comedies running amok if they can’t hear a joke on stage? Are ushers breaking up fisticuffs after someone stole someone’s seat? Are the interval’s icecream sellers being subjected to furious words when they run out of mint choc chip?

We’re told that some of the more raucous evenings — when audiences are actually encouraged to rise to their feet and join in the choruses — can get out of hand. For example, when the hunky star of Dirty Dancing walks down the aisles on his way to the stage, the ‘hen parties constantly grope him’. Shock horror! But come on. Dirty Dancing? that show — based on the famous 1987 film starring Patrick Swayze — is almost entirely about a buff young man strutting about and ripping off his shirt.

So if the girls in the auditorium can’t help but get a little excited, how hypocritical of the theatres to begin tut-tutting in disapproval — and filming the audience to boot!

I believe that this use of bodycams is just the latest depressing example of those in authority assuming that a lot of people are prone to what is known by psychologists as ‘casual aggression’. this is seen in road rage, wanton swearing at strangers — and now rowdiness in theatreland.

Indeed, the apparent need to use high-tech cameras to monitor feral audiences is the latest extension of the faintly menacing notices one sees everywhere nowadays.

‘We will not tolerate any verbal or physical abuse of our staff,’ reads the ubiquitous sign. you see these words in government offices, on railway platforms, in hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, at the dentist and even — in one particularly bizarre example — at a local launderette.

Of course, everyone has the right to work without being harassed and there are, of course, some unpleasant incidents where public service staff are threatened with violence. But these signs treat everyone — good or bad — the same, when it’s only a tiny minority who behave badly.

Theatre, as a live art form, has always been subversive, populist and raucous. In Ancient Greece, it started as a kind of religious ritual, based around the worship of Dionysus, the god of wine, with live music and processions of worshippers carrying phalloi — that is, oversized representations of the penis.

Centuries later, in Shakespeare’s day, his Globe theatre was sited on the lawless South Bank of the thames beside bear- pits and brothels. the Globe was a place where the boisterous masses laughed at the rich and pompous, wept over the deaths of romeo and Juliet and recoiled in horror at the cruelties of tyrants.

Shakespeare In love, the brilliant film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, shows how these early english audiences behaved more like a crowd on a modern football terrace than the polite, strait-laced and often painfully

bien pensant theatregoers of today. One of the jolliest, liveliest nights

I ever spent in a theatre was a raucous production of the reggae musical the harder they Come at the Stratford theatre royal in london’s east end, full of great old Jimmy Cliff songs such as Many rivers to Cross and you Can Get It If you really Want.

People brought cans of red Stripe lager and chicken takeaways. their phones rang — and they answered them. they called out to their friends across the auditorium. they hooted and hurrahed and laughed and danced throughout.

Of course, the late richard Griffiths famously took exception to a man in the audience whose phone rang on six separate occasions and he ordered him out of the auditorium.

But that was at the national theatre, not the ‘people’s theatre’ founded by Joan littlewood and its night of riotous reggae. In other words, most theatregoers want to have a good time — and at Stratford east they jolly well got it. Shakespeare would have recognised their enjoyment.

It is absurd, therefore, that if audiences show any inclination towards elizabethan- style liveliness, they are now to be filmed, shamed and made to sit down in their seats again like naughty schoolchildren.

theatre isn’t meant to be ‘safe’, for goodness’ sake. Some of its greatest masterpieces can truly horrify, haunting us for days and weeks afterwards.

Are we, the audience, meant to feel ‘ safe’ when the earl of Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out on stage in King lear? hardly.

the joy of theatre is that its entertainment can be high or low — but it must never be boring.

that said, it’s true that there have been some — very isolated — incidents of rowdy behaviour in a few theatres. At a performance of Julie at the national last summer, it is alleged that two ‘ middle- aged blokes’ began ‘ shoving each other’. ( It was tagged ‘#poshscrap’ on twitter.)

Meanwhile, one theatre producer claimed he was punched during a 2017 production of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic after he asked a man’s partner to stop using her phone.

But these hardly suggest a night out in a war zone. they are vanishingly rare examples that make the papers precisely because any aggression is so incongruous in the theatre.

this idiotic new measure, which seems to say so much about a culture of over-sensitivity today, is clearly part of the unending struggle to make everywhere a ‘safe space’, as the ugly jargon has it.

We have witnessed the parallel world where universities have adopted ‘ safe- space’ policies which threaten the right to free speech. Closely allied is the pernicious concept of ‘no-platforming’ — where speakers are denied the opportunity to speak.

Surely, prosecco-fuelled hen parties — or even the odd lairy bloke

— are merely examples of people letting their hair down and paying the theatres very well for the privilege. they are no threat to anyone.

they should not have to run the gauntlet of bossy ushers and frontof-house staff, stalking around the auditorium like special constables wearing what are essentially crowd-control cameras.

What a horrible atmosphere of chilly constraint this development is: the very opposite of the carnival atmosphere you expect at a West end musical.

It is a sad irony — and a national scandal — that Britain, the country that largely invented the concept of popular liberty and the right to privacy, now has more CCtV cameras than any other country in the world except China.

And with the spread of facial recognition technology, it’s becoming even more insidious. this move to control audiences by filming them, without their express consent, simply pushes us even closer to a Big Brother state.

Perhaps someone ought to write a book or play about that awful fate.

Oh, I forgot! George Orwell has already written one . . .