Big Girls don't cry: On crying at the theatre.

If you are a theatregoer, you probably had a little moment of recognition at that bit in Pretty Woman, when Julia Robert's character Vivien enjoys her first trip to the Opera and cries her eyes out (beautifully, of course). You know the bit, where an old lady asks if she enjoyed it and she replies; 'It was so good I almost peed my pants.'


I concede that spending that amount of time with Richard Gere might bring me to tears but my main point is that of all the cultural activities that I enjoy; films, music, dance or art, it is theatre that has the greatest capacity to make me cry. On returning from Edinburgh, I counted at least three occasions in which I cried, once was bizarrely at the end of a stand up show, in which a particularly gamely audience participant reminded me of my late father. Perhaps, I should disclude the last one as a bizarre premenstrual anomoly. However it is true that it is not just content but also form that can heighten our capacity for tears. Sitting in the comfort of the dark, feels like a safe space, you absorb the images, your focus is heightened, free from disctractions and your mind starts to absorb and go places you perhaps don't normally let it.

In this century there has been a huge increase in shows that physically immerse audience members within the performance, the idea being that physical audience participation heightens our sense of being and increases our empathy. I agree that this arrangement puts the audience in a less passive position but the idea that sitting and watching prevents empathy can be contested when we consider the discovery of 'mirror neurons', described in Bruce McConachie's excellent little book 'Theatre & Mind'. Mirror neurons are a network of cells in your brain that, 'respond in the same way whether you perform the action yourself or see someone else do it.' Which means that as we sit in the dark watching  an actors face and body  performing a harrowing rape scene, as was the case for example in Nirbaya, our 'mirror neurons for facial and bodily anger will fire in the same way as the actor's.' Which would explain the amount of audience members in tears pouring out of the assembly mound.

Yet, if we return to the scene in Pretty Woman (Sorry, I will be brief), Vivian's tears were wept in sadness, but her response shows that the experience was pleasurable. Bertolt Brecht rallied against this emotive response, in which audiences swooned and cried along with the characters on stage, describing these methods as a 'narcotics business'. He saw tears as an uncritical and cathartic response which he felt achieved nothing and was even dangerous to society. Yet, Brecht was decrying both naturalism (like that we see in film) and theatre that represents only the upper classes, neither of which were present in the plays I saw.

For the audiences crying during Gecko's Missing or Yael Farber's Nirbhaya, the images and stories within remain in the memory to be picked apart long after the tears have dried and besides apparently it's not only good for the mind but the body too. So carry on guys, cryings not just for the big girls its for everyone.

P.S. The image above is from a series of photos taken by Marco Anelli from MoMA exhibition The Artist is Present, which I found on the tumblr Marina Abromovich made me cry. See, everyones IS doing it!