Britain rediscovers the delights of pre-modern bacchanalia

David

We need Sharia. They don't have an alcohol problem in their societies.

On a more serious note, Britain went into the Enlightement, and continued through on its merry way, with exactly the same types of acohol issues.

Sheila

I wish I could laugh, David, but the serious calls for Sharia doing so on the basis that it would clean up society as if those countries that have it are some sort of moralistic Utopia.

Still, for those Westerners who fall for that claptrap abroad, there's a nice comeuppance for them in Dubai.

If they want Sharia law, let them stay there and don't come back here calling for it:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6716543.ece

Puzzled

Britons like a drink? Is this newsworthy?

Angela

Melanie, please don't hand out universal condemnation of the young. There are plenty of young people who would be appalled by such behaviour, those brought up by parents never seduced by New Labour hedonism, who would have had meted out substantial chastisement for less than courteous behaviour in private or in public. They really do exist, they will bring up their own children with decent values. Sadly, they are drowned out by the loud & loutish New Labour approved inadequates.

Jim

I'm not sure I'd agree. in Germany as the hyper inflation of the Weimer republic gathered steam you had a similar collapse in morals and a general growth in debauchery. Things eventually reached a point where a backlash developed and an Austrian guy came to power to re-impose order and decency. Oh.

Joshua

A wonderful paragraph:

'In 1809 the audience at a production of Macbeth at the newly opened Covent Garden theatre booed and hissed the cast because of a rise in ticket prices. The performance was interrupted by shouts of “old prices, old prices” and 500 Dragoon Guards were called out. The audience refused to leave until 2am. Prices were subsequently reduced.'

Stuart

'One production was interrupted after a woman was caught ‘pleasuring’ her partner in the stalls.'

Perhaps during 'God, that's Good' in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd?

Miranda Rose Smith

Dear Puzzled: I like a beer now and then myself. One of the pleasures of my vacation in London, some years ago, was a pint of Irish dark stout in a pub every evening. When I go to the theatre, I tend to my bodily needs IN THE LADIES ROOM, DURING INTERMISSION.
Dear Angela: I don't see Melanie handing out "universal condemnation of the young."
Rowdy behavior in theatres is not brand-new to England. Anyone ever hear of the Old Price riots? Read Great Expectations and Dickens' description of the audience at Mr. Wopsle's performance as Hamlet.

Alf Tupper

'pleasuring her partner in the stalls'?

I wouldn't have thought it possible to provide tea making facilities in such a cramped space.

Aah the white teat of technology...

Miranda Rose Smith

If this appalling behavior is caused by "falling ticket prices," how come one doesn't see it at the FREE concerts that are held in many American city parks in the Summer or at the FREE Shakespeare in Central Park?

Terry, Eilat - Israel

David - I'm originally from an Arab country, albeit, not one with official Shariá as law, but you are day-dreaming to think that Arabs don't drink themselves into unconsiousness, have sex in back-alleys, there are literally thousands & thousands of prostitutes of both sexes, drug use can only be described as phenomenal, street fights are very common, wife-beating is an ordinary occurance, in short, you need a dose of reality. Iran, which is a Shariá state, from what I've read, has incredible social problems with alcohol, drugs, & prostitution.

Mailman

Hahaha...thats quite a good line that. First in and first out of the Enlightenment! :)

BUT I dont think this is anything to do with falling ticket prices but more to do with a decline in moral civics (fuelled by alcohol).

john robert

Britain is a Lost country - you can see it everywhere and everyone in denial - Thats why people like me - the educated i.e. the people who can - left and are leaving. It is now being re-populated by a certain type of "different" populace. God help them!

David

"but you are day-dreaming to think that Arabs don't drink themselves into unconsiousness, have sex in back-alleys"

Wow. Perhaps you could read the next bit where I say, "on a more serious note".

You people really have a problem with muslims, don't you.

Mailman

Joshua,

Far out man, 500 dragoons were called out to quell some unrest.

Crickey, we cant even call out 3 police officers without moans of police brutality today!

How times have changed.

Geoff Miller

Who cares anymore?

Living in the UK is just how it must have felt in the last days of Rome. Like a slow car crash - or should I say chariot.

I got out 5 years ago after a final 7 years living in London which, as ever, is ahead of the rest of the country - but not in a good way.

Now I look on from abroad and have any feelings of "home sickness" dashed within minutes of driving off the ferry on my increasingly rare visits.

Overcrowding, aggression, pub closures, community decay, unacceptable public behaviour, dhimmitude, complacency, defeatism - SOCIALISM.

Cameron will not change anything - it's too deeply rooted now in the "Establishment", local and central government, education, Police etc. too many vested interests, embedded marxists and Common Purpose "graduates".

The UK is like a snake eating it's own tail. Eventually there will be nothing left.

They push working class children into crappy Comprehensives whilst privately educating their own. Send other mothers sons to fight, and die, abroad whilst theirs stay at home.

A decade of boom and bust from the guy who abolished it. A collapsed manufacturing base, a binge of spending funded by borrowing, massive Public Debts, a collapsed currency and balance of payments deficit.

You're bust guys and the Tories won't do anything about it with the massed ranks of the public sector, NHS, Quango's and the media ranged against them.

I just finished reading a book - The Rotters Club - about the final days of Callaghans Labour Government. It bemoans the arrival of Thatcher, sides with Red Robbo and all the while admitting the IMF bailouts, rising crime etc.

What struck me was the the Socialist author admits he wrote most of the book on the side of Lake Garda, Lombardy rathet than in Birmingham where it is set.

Such an apt portrayal of the engagedness of our "intelligensia" with the real world they have escaped but at the same time destroy.

Margaret Muller-Johansson

This is funny and also sad, I think the problem is not only alcohol but drugs, even David Cameron calls this kind of people "the broken society", the other day I was talking to a Caribbean man who was cleaning outside a church I ask him are those people near the church going to pray? he said no they are addicts and drunks who gather outside the church, he said before they used to say drinking and drugs is black people's culture but not anymore now a days it is the opposite, the people who are drinking and taking drugs are mostly whites from the middle class they are the new blacks, it is true G*d save them!

Sheila

Terry, Eilat - Israel - quite!

But this is something many in the media connive never to talk about. Doesn't fit with their argument that we're being blown up because we're amoral. They play that record with complete shamelessness.

As for urinating in the auditorium and so on, what would Noel Coward make of it all?

"Don't put your daughter in front of the stage, Mrs Worthington."

Ronnie

It's simply too, too much.

Terry, Eilat - Israel

Sheila - I just think it's hilarious when I hear Westerners talk about Muslim countries as if they were somehow Puritans & did not have the same vices common to most of mankind. In Western societies, things are far more public while in Muslim countries there is far more hypocrisy & vice is more private. As for David, I have not much problem with Muslims but quite a problem with Islam.

Sheila

Geoff Miller, The Rotters' Club, yes.

Sebastian Coe is a very good author even if he is completely confused about the source of this country's ills. Weirdly, he is now part of the Establishment tearing this country to pieces. He's not quite the Brummie outsider he imagines himself to be.

Sebastian Coe's hero is BS Johnson, who ended up committing suicide.

Today we are surrounded by bien pensant authors committing hari kiri on their own race and culture.

Indulge yourself with suicide if you must, but don't include the rest of us.

Alf Tupper

Ah but you gloomy types have it all wrong you know. Dr Massie says so.

Read it here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/209895/page/1

Cheered me up no end to find that I'm totally deluded.

Herbert Thornton

What reason is there to believe that David Cameron's Tories - if elected - will make the slightest bit of difference?

Let's face facts. One especially interesting fact is that urinating in an auditorium has a great deal more in common with the behaviour of members of the Bullingdon Club than with that of members of the BNP.

Noah Aaron Bashi

You are right Melanie,
Great Britain: first into the Enlightenment, and now first out.
I guess it is first come first go...Ciao Britannia

Francis

This really has nothing to do with alcohol, and I fear it will be used as yet another excuse to deny us our small pleasures.

N

Miranda Rose Smith,

"If this appalling behavior is caused by "falling ticket prices," how come one doesn't see it at the FREE concerts that are held in many American city parks in the Summer or at the FREE Shakespeare in Central Park?"

You need to look harder, it happens there too.

John Edwards

Sheila - you mean Jonathan COe rather than the ex-Tory MP Sebastian. Actually the sequel to Rotters Club "the Closed Circle" is quite scathing about New Labour as well.

Merlyn

What we are seeking is balance, that is a centre point between the extremes. I believe that is why we have such a contrasting society.

Paul L

Urinating in the auditorium must indeed be viewed as the height of barbarism considering how beautiful some theatre toilets are.

Jeremy

"Great Britain: first into the Enlightenment, and now first out."

That's a great line, Mel. I might have edited out the word "now" - for the sake of brevity and punch.

But it's still a top line. Well done.

Augustus

David- "We need Sharia" What? Like burkas to be donned at the box office, or else no admittance?

C. Gee

This is what a demotic utopia looks like. Universal vulgarity is equality made visible. Too late now for the socialist intelligentsia to protest when prole habits spoil their temples of culture.
In any case, behavior in the audience is not quite as disgusting as what is going on on stage. Art is leading the way into the sewer. Nothing more authentic than bodily functions and effluvia therefrom.

Jeremy

"Britain rediscovers the delights of pre-modern bacchanalia..."

Not sure about that, Mel. You will recall that theatre itself begins with The Great Dionysia - a sort of Olympic games for playwrights (and for poets and musicians too?). We really should bring it back - imagine the good it would do for the creative arts.

Also, you have to remember that the worship of Dionysius was set set within the context of formal, religious and riualistic societies.

I doubt very much if urinating in the auditorium would have been any more welcome at the performance of a play by Sophocles than it is today...

Buntin Tosser

Francis.

Pot pourri my friend, pot pourri.
Alcohol is a large pleasure.

Ronnie

Francis, alcohol is not a small pleasure. It's an enormous great pleasure!

Vision Aforethought

@Geoff Miller: Spot on. Yet another comment that puts into words the thoughts of so many of us. (Saved me much typing - thanks!) I'm still here, it's horrible and getting worse.

James Murphy

Geoff Miller, your prognosis for this sceptered Isle is dark indeed. But surely dear old Blighty's worth fighting for? Actually, no, you're right, it's not. Got any room for a freeloader in your foreign idyll?

Harry O

"...One production was interrupted after a woman was caught ‘pleasuring’ her partner in the stalls...".
Well it makes a change from the all simulated sex promulgated as art on the stage during the last 30 years, but is it art? Methinks the producers protest too much.

MikeF

A lot of the liberal-left congratulate themselves on their 'post-Enlightenment' values. The problem is they do not seem to appreciate that post-Englightment values are rather more like pre-Enlightenment than Enlightenment values.

Pinkie Brown

Don't kick those people out of the theatres. What if they start going to football games, there wont be a decent place left to bring the children.

Derek

All should pause and consider Melanie Phillips illustration to her blog: Hogarth's Gin Lane. The series of prints from which this is taken was issued in 1751. Now when exactly was the Enlightnment in Great Britain...? While we have the Sam Johnson de nos jours in Mrs. Phillips, the Enlightenment in our country is an ongoing project.

Rich Baxter

More snobbery masquerading as journalism.

"Critics believe the vulgar antics have been fuelled by falling ticket prices."

Yeah, because wealthy people would never behave like this, right? Not Prince Harry, Euan Blair or those awfully decent Bullingdon chaps.

Not to mention the fact that for the average Brit, to attend a West End show would entail travel and accommodation costs of several hundred pounds even if the actual show ticket was free.

The point being, most of us don't live in London, and to go to the West End might be a once in a lifetime experience for us. So back right off, and stop lumping us in with the fornicators and urinators because we've dared to pay a reasonable price for a ticket.

C. Gee

This is what demotic utopia looks like. Equality in vulgarity. Too late for the socialist intelligentsia to fear for their temples of culture. What's on stage is often as disgusting as the audience. Artists are telling us that impulses, body functions and effluvia are authentically human. Each person's pee is a Turner Prize. Every act of copulation is performance art.

Britain needs a lid put on it.

Miranda Rose Smith

Dear N: You could be right. I havn't been to a free concert-in-the-park, or to the Delacorte Theatre, in more than 20 years.
Dear Mr. Brown: They're too highbrow to go to football games.

Miranda Rose Smith

Dear Sheila: If the media actually says "we're being blown up because we're amoral,"
someone should say to the media "That's a reason to blow a person up?" I thought we were being blown up because we were pro-Israel.

TimT

I remember reading an article about chav kids vomiting on a West End theatre stage some four years ago. A Guardian writer recently attended a theatre show in France where the audience abused the actors, shouting, 'this is s**t!', and like epithets. Lots of rock concerts audiences will just throw beer cans/bottles/etc at the stage.

These problems are perennial, like some other commenters have suggested (as, indeed, Hogarth's Gin Lane suggests, above).

Lizzy

Yes, that sort of behaviour is not new. But those of us who wonder what on earth is the matter with these people cherish an ideal that the human race progresses and develops itself to higher standards. I know, but I still hope.

Roy

Although I left Britain 52 years ago it still concerns me to see this seemingly disintegration of society, the slide into greater depths of depravity. Perhaps we are reaping the seeds of revolt sown by aspiring communists at mid century to destroy the decent core values of a democratic beast. Now to be taken over by the morbid religious fanatics of today. They have picked up the rolling ball and taking advantage of the rotting values to spread more mayhem. Along with the lack of backbone in political circles.
First in a clean-up . . . dump the BBC.

Ellen

Yes, Dave, we know when the Enlightenment began in Great Britain. But it didn't have an instantaneous effect did it?

You tell us the Enlightenment is an "ongoing project". Quite, but if the Enlightenment is an ongoing project, why is behaviour in public - in a place like a theatre for heaven's sake - going backwards?

Marcy

Anti-Christian + Anti-Jesus/God + Anti-Bible = Downfall of society and eventually the nation. What did expect?

Ellen

Yes, we know this sort of behaviour is not new.

TimT (Guardian reader, says it all really), Derek and others mention the Hogarth picture above as if to prove a point - Auntie Melanie clearly knows this behaviour is not new or she wouldn't have put it there, would she?

Talk about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

What Mel wants to know is why we are allowing society to regress to a point where people think they can do this.

Says Derek: "Now when exactly was the Enlightnment in Great Britain...?" We know when it was, Derek, and we know it didn't take effect overnight, so why wouldn't this behaviour be found in a Hogarth drawing barely a generation into the Enlightenment?

"While we have the Sam Johnson de nos jours in Mrs. Phillips, the Enlightenment in our country is an ongoing project."

Well if behaviour in our theatres is comparable to that in that Hogarth picture, it seems to suggest that Ms Phillips is right and we are going backwards, not forwards.

Original Tony

As I have said before, the liberal insanity that pervades western society is a result of the west turning against Israel, it is a spiritual punishment, a spiritual consequence of the west ignoring scriptures that declare friends of israel will be safe and prosperous while her enemies will decay. Can anyone explain it any other way?

Keith

It is lazy complacency to dismiss reports like this with a smile because such behaviour is 'nothing new'. Rape is not new. Does that mean that when a woman is raped we should tell her to stop making a fuss because it has always happened? Racism and homophobia are not new, but when racist/homophobic incidents take place today, liberals throw up their hands in horror and demand new laws to counteract these 'hate crimes'. This 'stop worrying, it's not new' argument is used very selectively!

Margaret Muller Johansson

Keith, do you mean the liberals are trying to voodoo up people for hiding the true ? Well, they are not going to voodoo people like me, Sorry!

Chicken Little

Oh no, the sky is falling in!

But in all seriousness, this drunken fooling around in theatre is considered a sign of the moral decline of the UK? Do you people know no history? You might want to do a little research into patterns of drug use (including alcohol) and 'anti-social' behavior during the Victorian age, before writing such nonsense.

P.S. to all ex pats moaning about the state of Britain, how would you know, you don't live there any more.

Derek

Ellen, I think Chicken Little at 11:24am speaks for me as a response to your comment. I do not think there was a Britain that looked like a picture on a chocolate box lid or an Olde Worlde Christmas card somewhere half-way between Britain entering and, as Melanie Phillips would have it, leaving the Enlightenment. The kind of behaviour she reports are deplorable and i myself get upset when I read about booing at cricket matches...; but my point is that the Enlightenment never finally arrived and is unfinished business in England. By the same token, and to keep some perspective, we should note that in China, for instance, urinating and fondling in theatres is not a common occurence but.........

stanley Jerusalem

"pleasuring her partner in the stalls."
It couldn't have been in Gt.Britain. There's not enough bloody room.

Marcus

Chicken Little - yes,that needed saying! Why do some ex-pats have this burning need to rubbish their home country? A way of trying to soothe that worrying doubt that they might have made a big mistake? And anyway if they are so happily floating free of the Sodom and Gommorrah in which we are apparently all condemned to eek out our miserable existence, what are they doing hanging around on British blogs? Homesick by any chance?

Ellen

Yes, thank you, Derek, I can see Chicken Little doesn't answer any of the points I raised. That doesn't mean they've gone away.

I know all about Victorian drug taking etc, but it wasn't going on in front of an entire theatre audience, was it?

The clue to this piece is that it comes from a news page. This is new for people who go to the theatre. It's not something most of us will have seen in our lifetime.

Did Noel Coward and Binkie Beaumont have to have heaps of bouncers at their shows?

Of course not.

You say "my point is that the Enlightenment never finally arrived and is unfinished business in England", yes I can see that but it's a non-point given that people's behaviour in public is going backwards, isn't it?

Derek

Ellen, some things are going backwards; somethings are going forwards. I doubt, for instance, that a London theatre critic, reviewing Orson Welles' performance of of Othello, would, as Ken Tynan did in 1951, entitle his review "Citizen Coon". Britons, for better or for worse, have a reputation for being drunk and disorderly going back at least as far as the observations of the Romans when they invaded us a couple of thousand years ago and it was the Duke of Wellington who said of the British army "I don't know what they'll do to the enemy; but, by God, they frighten me" and elsewhere he had this exchange "Duchess of Richmond: They're the salt of England, Arthur.
Duke of Wellington: Scum. Nothing but beggars and scoundrels, all of them. Gin is the spirit of their patriotism". I am not sure that one of the main aims of the Enlightenment is to disband the Bullingdon Club and I do not see that we are yet about to adopt dueling again as a means of settling disputes between gentlemen.If we do produce a Shakespeare though to match the prostitutes and pickpockets that apparently mingled with the audiences in the Elizabethan theatres, the loss of the Enlightenment, if such be the price, may not be entirely a one-way street to barbarism. There will in any vent be a reaction to the behaviour which we both deplore - indeed the placing of bouncers in certain theatres suggest that the reaction has already set in. I also doubt that the behaviour complained of took place during a performance of what I understand to be an epic performance of Hamlet. Does anybody know what show was playing? May be therein lies a clue...History does not proceed in neat straight lines and I would not therefore myself extrapolate from the unseemly events noted by Melanie Phillips the decline and fall of civilization -yet.

Derek

Incidentally,my question as to the date when the British Enlightment started was mainly rhetorical - then I realized that I did not really know the answer with any precision, so availed myself of the internet to research it (surely a manifestation of the ongoing enlightenment project in western society). The suggestion I came upon is that it dates from 1620 with the publication of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and ended with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781. So by the time Hogart published his engraving, Gin Lane, it was by this measure already more than half way through, not just at its inception. All that gin drinking should therefore have had been swept away by then. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,born 1647 and so a child of the British Enlightment according to this timeline, used to urinate over the balcony at the theatre on to the crowd below. Of course he was something of an exception - and also a cracking good poet, if for rather special tastes. And of course during his lifetime, under Cromwell, the Jews were happily invited to return to England. So may be the urination and fondling in theatres in 2009 will coincide at long last with the appearance of a great wave of support for gallant little Israel and a recognition of the important cultural links we have with Israel's story both before and after the enlightenment. Let's hope so, for the honour of the country.

Ellen

Derek, how many times are you going to miss the point?

We know all this.

That's why the Hogarth illustration appears at the top.

We've got the message, OK?

But this is clearly a new development, OK? That's why it appeared in a NEWSpaper called The Sunday Times.

It was not previously something people saw or expected to see. That is what makes it newsworthy.

Have you got that?

We want to know why people are regressing to the historical behaviour you so pointlessly keep telling us about.

If this is not a new development for these theatres and their audiences, please tell us why the theatre owners are having to hire bouncers - something they formerly didn't have to do.

You know, the new thing that happened that brought this to the attention of a newspaper, which suggests it's not been par for the course in living memory?

Derek

Sorry Ellen, let me put things simply for you: we were not first into the Enlightenment and we are not first out.

Suki

Let me put things simply for you, Derek, every time you've been asked a question on this thread you've failed to find an answer for it.

Laura

Derek, by your own admission, the most you know about the Enlightenment is a smattering of internet searches.

What sort of judge are you if by your own admission you don't know what you're talking about?

Henrietta Shoemaker

When the British are turning liberal atheists who don't like God or respect Christianity other people are turning to religion and extremism this is what happens when people are too soft and liberals, now Great Britain doesn't have only drunk people, but the highest and fastest and the most dangerous religious extremist growing in their own country, maybe the promotion from the lefties or people are just too busy having fun urinating in the theatre stages, yuck! I only see big gap here, alcohol is just accuse sometimes pain killer people need to wake up and stop being too liberal they need to start going their churches at least ones a week and save their country from the religious extremists who believe the 7th century biblical codes and punishments, and after that everything will be okay hopefully

Derek

Suki, rhetorical questions are not meant to be answered by the person to whom they are addressed. Are they?

No, Laura, by my own admission I did not know with any precision when the British Enlightenment started. No doubt everyone else here knew it was 1620; but I like to check these things - it was one of the things the British Enlightenment taught me to do.

Suki

Derek, I know you're lost in your own head with your rhetorical question, which despite you telling us "rhetorical questions are not meant to be answered by the person to whom they are addressed. Are they?" you decide to answer anyway by telling us how little you know about the Enlightenment but I was referring to things like this:
"We want to know why people are regressing to the historical behaviour you so pointlessly keep telling us about.

"If this is not a new development for these theatres and their audiences, please tell us why the theatre owners are having to hire bouncers - something they formerly didn't have to do.

"You know, the new thing that happened that brought this to the attention of a newspaper, which suggests it's not been par for the course in living memory?"

I can see why you've got massive difficulties dealing with that, but it won't disappear because you wish it will.

Laura

Derek, you are the only person here who wrote this smug rhetorical question: "Now when exactly was the Enlightnment in Great Britain...?" so if you're going to set yourself up as some sort of expert on the Enlightenment by writing with such condescendion, it might have been a good idea to have known exactly what you were talking about.

That way you won't look so silly when you say you've had to run off and check your facts.

Rob-NY

"And the cast of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music were stunned to see an audience member walk over to the side of the stage and relieve himself".
The critics are upset because that's their job.

Felicitas

I wonder why many people vote for the British National Party "BNP" last time, because they want to save the British culture and enlightenment if there is any
ha ha

charles_de_Lafayette

I love Hogarth.

Archie

Intriguing! Pleasuring how, exactly?

hicup

Right on. I've never heard of anything so absurd in my entire life! We're not talking enlightenment here, we are talking pre-Roman Britain.