Yes, I hate myself just a little bit for that pun too. But, with a not entirely unforeseen bit of 'free time' at the moment, I have to entertain myself in whatever way I can. Yesterday, that meant seeing Timon of Athens at the National.

First off, a small explanation – for the majority of the first half, I was sat in the second row (and actually had nothing in front of me but legroom). My friend, overcome by the amount of Coke he'd drunk before curtain up, snuck out a few scenes in. And didn't come back. For a very long time. Thoughts of him becoming entangled in some inescapable conversation outside turned into him somehow knocking himself out and slowly dying near a urinal. So I snuck out too.

It turns out that (in the Olivier at least) if you’re sat very near the front, you’re simply not let back in after leaving (apparently there have been complaints from actors directed at the FOH staff). So I ended up joining my completely healthy and not at all endangered friend in the back row of the stalls for the final few scenes. This did, at least, give me the interesting experience of seeing the same production from two different positions. 

Arguments for sitting at the back: maybe all the tiny details that constantly irritated me throughout the first half would've gone unnoticed. The vividly yellow wine (was there really no time to dilute it?); the dropped fork at the banquet which was never replaced; a particular actress' entirely inappropriate footless leggings; an actor's habit of constantly ploughing away at his gums with his tongue/fingers to telegraph the messaging 'rich people do love cocaine'. 

Arguments for sitting at the front: you actually feel like part of the show. You're so close that, whenever an actor addresses the audience, they must be talking to you - I mean, there's no way they couldn't notice you, right? In the front rows, there's far less of a sense that the audience is there to do a job (sit, listen, nod where appropriate) and the actors are there to do an entirely separate one.

Now, feeling separate to those onstage can work brilliantly – it’s only right that in A Doll’s House, the audience are like hidden eavesdroppers, prying into Nora’s most private secrets. But most of the time, I don’t enjoy it. Naturally with a space as huge as the Olivier, making the whole audience feel included is a huge challenge, but one I would love to see being met.

In a way, the challenge was met at the very end of the show. One wonderful moment where the whole audience felt involved - where you really got the sense that a huge number of people had congregated together to be a part of something special and everyone knew it. It was the curtain call. And a significant part of me couldn’t help thinking, what a shame when the most magical moment in a production is once it’s actually ended.

(I should note, I didn’t hate Timon – I thought some aspects of it were very well done. But I couldn’t help being niggled by quite a lot of issues throughout.)