Ralph Oswick: When full frontal nudity brought the house down

At a recent Bath awards ceremony a chap roundly scolded me for talking during the acceptance speeches.

I thought my mildly snide comments about our rivals were delivered sotto voce but apparently not. It must have been the prosecco talking!

I know how the fellow felt. A colleague of mine landed a big part in the West End musical The Far Pavilions. He played an officer of the Raj and as he delivered his heart-rending dying speech over the camp fire by the Khyber Pass you could hear a pin drop. At that point, the woman in front of me turned to her companion and

asked in a very loud voice ‘So, if Tottenham lose this one, they’re out, right?,’ thus ruining his big moment.

There have been several other notable interruptions throughout my illustrious career as an event organiser and theatre goer.

I once booked a performance art company for Walcot Burial Chapel. The audience was warned in advance that there would be full frontal nudity in the show, a first for this historic but rather run down venue. At the very moment when the naked couple on stage turned to face the audience, a huge piece of the ceiling fell on the back row.

Unperturbed, we simply moved the dust covered patrons into the front seats where nobody had dared to sit, and the show went on.

Towards the end of five hours of Wagner at the Colosseum, during which I had given up the will to live, things were enlivened when a woman in full evening dress threw up over the balustrade of her upper tier box, much to the chagrin of those occupying the lower tiers.

And at Sadler’s Wells, with the operatic heroine in mid aria, a bag lady in a pink plastic mac burst through the door of the upper circle and made her way across to the opposite door, pausing only to loudly address the startled audience with ‘I can’t believe you paid money to see this rubbish. You must be bleedin’ mad!’ Exit stage left!

All these incidents were trumped in Germany when, in the great tradition of Natural Theatre shows, I left the stage and began to regale the audience from my position on someone’s lap in the third row. Suddenly, a woman nearby stood up and promptly collapsed.

I hurried back behind the curtain and a message came through that the lady had died. Well, we waited and waited. After about twenty minutes we heard the distant wail of an ambulance, but still no further information came through.

What to do? Finally, I made the momentous decision that the show should continue from the point in the script just after my foray into the auditorium. So curtain up and off we went and the show went down a storm.

Remarkably, throughout this entire incident the audience retained a respectful silence. A lesson there for yours truly perhaps?

We later learned that the woman had survived her ordeal and was in fact alive and well.