h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is usual that people interact with actors spontaneously?

do you like it?

what would you say after a great/awful performance?

any experience to share?

just checked the meaning of groundlings...

take it as someone daring, not neccesarily uneducated, as the definition says,
even sharp.

I think what you're talking about might be what the brits refer to as pantomime. It's comedy theater with audience participation.

Oh no it isn't!

Oh yes it is!

I was thinking of that open-air theatre, elizabethan public playhouse, with a pit/yard in the center where groundlings were standing. Or similar.

Thats what its original meaning was Maria

Theatre design moved away from the Shakespearean style for many centuries, separating the audience from the actors. The 'proscenium arch' is the sort of frame around the front of the stage that defines what is real life and what is the play.

In the 20th Century, theatre designers starting moving back to a model where the audience was close to the actors, removing the arch, putting the audience around a central stage or mixing the actors in with the audience.

Old habits die hard, though. Theatre audiences, in the UK and Ireland at least, are used to keeping quiet during plays. They consider their function is to look and listen, not to join in. Theatre companies that want the audience to be part of the performance have to work very hard to get them to participate.

The one exception is pantomime, which is a sort of comedy play with a very traditional format. It is perfectly normal for the audience in pantomime to shout out comments, and to react verbally to what is happening.

Maria
One obvious place would be The Globe on the south bank in London where you can get Groundling Tickets.

gracias Gnomon, that´s interesting. It seems spanish scenenarios have followed a similar trend.


there´re more similarities, this is a playhouse from the 16 century in Spain, it´s called corral de comedias, corral means yard. It reminds somehow the Globe, doesn´t it?

http://www.festivaldealmagro.com/espacio_actual.php?id=1

it was used as a hostal and also as theatre.

btw, I´ll be tomorrow in that village, to see a Midsummer´s night dream and on saturday, a spanish classic from the Barroque period.

That village holds along July an international festival on classical theatre.

I think you'll find many events at the Edinburgh festival (and its ilk) will encourage audience reaction/ involvement.

For artistic play acting with earthy audience participation, I can recommend most Premier League fixtures.

As I understand it, it used to be common for plays to be performed in actual courtyards. You didn't bring people to the theater, you brought the theater to the people. The plays also being written to take advantage of the setting/layout of a typical courtyard.