MICROPHONES ARE RUINING THE WEST END. SINCE WHEN DID THEATRE BECOME A ROCK GIG?
Andrew Lloyd Webber knows a problem when he hears it. He’s admitted to finding Jamie Lloyd’s heavily miked revival of Lloyd Webber’s 1978 musical Evita at the London Palladium, starring Rachel Zegler, “too loud”. In the Sunday Times last month he said: “Evita was deafening on opening night. I thought I liked everything loud, but Jamie likes it louder.”
Lloyd Webber even implied that the torrent of noise in Evita came at the expense of clarity and coherence. “The feedback that I am getting is that the young are absolutely loving it,” he said. “But they like the overall feel of the evening – they don’t really follow the story.”
Online forums were full of similar complaints. “It was so hard to actually [hear] the words and the ensemble at times, following the story was tricky,” wrote one. “The sound [was] so loud and the vocals sounded really forced and shouted, they became a blur,” deplored another. “[On the evidence of that production] I wouldn’t have known what the hell the story was about,” one West End producer told me. “Would anyone? I don’t want to be hit in the head with a sound. If you are going to a play or a musical and you can’t hear [the story], then something is wrong.”
Musical theatre has a noise problem. Last year, the Broadway superstar Patti LuPone made headlines after she complained that she could hear the sound coming from the Alicia Keys’s musical Hell’s Kitchen while she was performing with Mia Farrow in The Roommate on Broadway. Last month she swore she would never work there again. “[Broadway thinks] audiences are deaf,” she told the BBC World Service. “I can’t understand the lyrics.”
Meanwhile, in the West End, the noise levels at Paddington have apparently caused some parents to take out their children mid performance, while other audience members are reporting bringing ear plugs to shows as a matter of course. It’s an issue off Shaftesbury Avenue, too: I disliked the way song after song is belted out at Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed production of Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre (it transfers to the West End this autumn), often at the expense of the score’s vertiginous balancing of darkness and light. “The more we amplify, the more we lose the story, and as the characters [in a musical] become bigger and less vulnerable,” says the leading producer David Pugh, who never uses mics in his productions. “I thought sound and lighting are there to complement a show, not dictate.”
Pugh is an increasingly rare example of a producer defying the growing trend for amplified sound not just in musicals but also straight plays, too. His current touring production of The Constant Wife, starring Kara Tointon, is without mics, and he only adds a floating mic at the front of the stage in large auditoriums seating 1500 plus people. “I like to work with actors who can project,” he says crisply. “And it’s a different show if you are putting their voices through mics; it becomes televisual.” The Royal Court is another exception, rarely using mics – one reason I loved its recent production of John Proctor is the Villain is because it relied on the unmediated intimate power of the actors’ naked voices.
Yet elsewhere the use of mics is spreading. I’ve seen straight plays where actors are miked up in ways that seem to create a wall of generic unified sound, meaning you can’t always tell who is actually talking. A colleague complains that the combination of miking and a lot of (therefore unnecessary) shouting means that what the cast is actually saying is frequently inaudible in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Old Vic.
“Even though amplification allows an audience to hear, this doesn’t mean an audience necessarily receives the detail or the intention of the performance itself,” says the director Jonathan Munby. He hasn’t miked his cast in his critically acclaimed production of The Price starring Henry Goodman, currently at the Marylebone Theatre. “To be fair, the space is small and I was working with four pros who didn’t need them,” Munby says. “But one of the beautiful things about The Price is the audience being in the room with those characters. I didn’t want to be in the way of that at all.”
Goodman agrees. “I personally don’t like wearing mics at all,” he says. “For me, inviting the audience to imagine is better than telling them.” Older actors tend to agree with him. “I don’t like amplification in the theatre,” said Roger Allam last year. “Obviously it’s necessary for musicals, but something is removed from the experience. Part of the glory of being in the theatre is the acoustic nature of it.”
“I remember I directed Ian McKellen in King Lear, and we didn’t use mics” adds Munby – his acclaimed revival transferred from Chichester to the West End in 2017. “Not least because there was no way of getting a mic on Ian.” Indeed – while introducing a recent screening of his new comedy, The Christophers, McKellen dispensed with the microphone he had been given halfway through his speech with no discernable shift in volume. A jovial heckler called out in a boomy thespy tone, “The stage!” – to which McKellen replied: “That’s theatre training for you, darling.”
Yet the attitudes of McKellen et al – who hail from a generation where the ability to project was an unquestioned part of an actor’s tool kit – are at sharp variance with an industry seemingly either no longer able or willing to value it. The prevailing approach seems to be, when in doubt, mic up. “Actors are still properly trained to use their voice at drama school, but the minute they come out, a director puts a mic on them,” says Munby. “So they lose that skill.”
“The West End is definitely getting louder,” says one sound engineer who has been in the industry for 20 years. “Particularly the dialogue in musicals. Which is a problem in shows where the dialogue is so trite. Twenty years ago, RSC shows were never miked,” he adds. “But take [Rupert Goold’s] Hamlet [for the RSC], which is on tour at the moment. A lot of people within the industry are thinking, ‘Does that dialogue really need to be miked?’ And unfortunately, I think that it does.”
One reason he thinks this is because he suspects audiences are losing what he calls “the art of active listening”. “Traditionally people would pay close attention to what the actors were saying,” he says. “But I was at the sound desk on a recent out of London show, where a woman three rows in front was munching popcorn all the way through the first half. She then asked me during the interval to turn up the sound because she couldn’t hear it.” He thinks West End audiences – and producers – are losing interest in subtlety. “Everything has to be an event. People don’t want to hear a string quartet anymore. They want to go to the Albert Hall and hear something by John Williams with Anna Lapwood hammering on the organ.”
Certainly many audiences appear to want loud volume. “If you look back over the past 25 years, people definitely prefer a louder sound today,” says the producer Nica Burns, who owns seven West End theatres. “Very few productions these days don’t have music or sound effects. The theatre experience today is that sound and music alongside video are much more integrated with the script.”
Noise and mics have been a source of controversy in the theatre for decades. The New York Times was complaining about noise levels on Broadway in the 1980s. Today, the acceleration of technology means that mics and sound amplification technology are generally much less obtrusive than they were even five years ago: the National Theatre, for example, uses integrated mics in ways that mean most audiences would be unaware the actors are miked at all.
“There used to be a lot of harrumphing backstage about mics: it was thought asking a great stage actor to mic up was somehow emasculating,” says Elliot Levey, who is currently appearing with John Lithgow in the Broadway transfer of the Royal Court’s smash hit Roald Dahl play Giant. “But microphone tech used to be rubbish. Now it’s brilliant. There is a Luddite quality to all this. What would Shakespeare do? He’d use mics.”
I’d beg to differ. However supposedly imperceptible the technology today, there is still an audible difference between a voice that is miked and a voice that is not. However great the performance, the former sounds mediated, the other true. And we’re in danger of forgetting the difference.
“When I directed Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare’s Globe [in 2015], I did a vocal session at the start of rehearsals inside the auditorium, just to shock the cast really into realising how much technique they would need,” says Munby – the Globe uses no amplification technology at all. “The younger cast members were shouting away, thinking they needed all of this vocal energy to be heard, but it had the opposite effect, because they were just blasting everywhere without any clarity of voice. And then Jonathan Pryce [who was playing Shylock] just spoke in the centre of the space and could be heard from right at the back.”
So who’s to blame? Not necessarily actors – the fact that film and TV work now dominate over stage is not their choice. But it’s almost certainly true that a small minority of audiences increasingly regard watching live performance as a passive experience. And it’s definitely true that a large majority of those working within the industry seem to think audiences prefer bombast over content, and loudness over meaning.
Yet those lucky enough to have seen the opening of Giant at the Royal Court in 2024 would have revelled in the rare magic of hearing actors such as Levey and, in particular, Lithgow performing without amplification, each word rich with detail and as clear as a bell. This is theatre done best, in my book.
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