You will find some actors blaming the audience for not getting a show, being too raucous, only laughing internally. I understand the emotional response, after all, we feel what we feel, but I do often wonder why people cannot check themselves, stop before they say anything destructive after a show. One of the frustrations, and certainly a major joy, of being an actor, is that it's pretty hard to tell how well you're doing. Yes, there are reviews, or if it's a funny show laughter feels good, or you can be delighted because you managed not to cause any kind of technical or business (business being, say, a complicated custard pie scene in a panto) disaster. But the reviewer's companion may have hated your performance or people might have felt tricked into laughing by all-jokes-and-no-substance theatre, or you got through the very complicated fight scene but nobody believes it was really a fight.
As for me, I do not pretend to understand much about what an audience feels. I've said it before, and, being me, I'll say it again, a lot: how on earth can an actor 'know' in the way that they seem to, that a show has gone a particular way? Let alone how their own part in it went? If you're playing Hamlet or Winne in Happy Days or Rebecca in Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister I can see the temptation of believing that there is a direct correlation between your performance and what you feel about it, but it is only what you feel. It is allowed, but it does not give you any definitive information.
So, I might think that my littlest cousin's fidgeting can be interpreted, I might even be able to blame myself in some way, for encouraging such a young chap to see the show, for not making it clear he would not like it. But I decided long ago not to do that to myself and not to do it to my audiences. And time and again I am reminded that it is the right thing to do. They can react how they want and at the end of the night I walk away and get on with the (mostly more important) parts of my life. It is only acting: nobody dies... and if they do you really should think about a career change.
There is a carnival feel after this show for me - there are so many key characters in the audience and they seem to have enjoyed it, and, given that I am the only practicing actor in my extended family, I choose to believe them when they tell me they got through it okay, or anything above that, enjoyment-wise. My littlest cousin tells me he has questions and we agree that I'll answer them the next day, for me this is because we are cracking open the Cape bubbly we have carefully brought or, should I say, arduously not drunk during the weeks since we left Cape Town. We take a picture of the family group, my mother exudes relief and, maybe, pride - it's hard to tell with my mum, and Martin seems satisfied enough.
People are wont to ask me what Kate would think of the show. I want always to point out that there is only a show because she's dead, but I have to resist. I rarely think of what Kate would want or feel, she is so dead to me, though I often long so hard for her counsel, her encouragement, her shoulders, either one of them, that it freezes my tears, stops my breath, winds me like a statue at a busy station as the world rushes past. But looking at this night, full of my cousins and uncle and close friends I reflect that for once I have a sense that Kate would be pleased about this, though annoyed to miss out on it. For once, wondering what my sister would think about something, is not, to quote my inestimable brother, like pondering whether Thomas Aquinas would have enjoyed the dodgems.
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