Before media such as film, recorded music, and television became fully developed, live performance was the principal form of enter available to the masses. Throw in the passions which can be stirred up among large crowds of people, and it is thus unsurprising that mass uproar has taken place during many performances throughout history. For today’s entry, I will describe three notable examples.
Perhaps the most catastrophic disturbance stirred up by a play happened in 1849, when renowned English actor William Macready arrived in New York to perform Macbeth at the Astor Opera House. People from all walks of life would regularly attend Shakespeare performances, and thus had strong opinions on which actor was the best. Macready had quite a few critics in New York, who preferred American actor Edwin Forrest. Much of this criticism came from Macready’s Englishness, as anti-English sentiment was quite common among members of the lower classes, especially the Irish immigrants who had been arriving in New York in large numbers.
Macready’s first performance was booed, and he would’ve left New York afterwards if his fans hadn’t begged him to stay. However, the elites of New York prepared for the worst, buying up all the seats in the house and placing hundreds of policemen and soldiers outside. And the worst did indeed come to pass, as a violent mob about 10,000 strong surrounded the the theater and started attacking the structure and those who were guarding it. In the rioting that followed, about 22 people died due to what was surely one of the worst-received performances in history.
However, it was far from the only performance throughout history to inspire some sort of chaos. In 1907, Irish nationalist sentiments would again stir up an uproar around a play, though this time both the play’s audience and its writer were from Ireland itself. Agitations for Irish independence were growing at the time, so any Irish writer was expected to be a defining figure of the country’s culture. Thus, when John Millington Synge’s play “The Playboy of the Western World” was performed at the Abbey theater in Dublin, audiences were appalled at the immorality of its title character, and by a scene in which women in shifts (a sort of nightgown undergarment) were sent across the stage. During the play’s second performance, the audience stormed the stage, and the ensuing riot would overshadow the play itself, although things eventually calmed down.
Finally, a calmer (at least relative to the other two entries on the list) backlash occurred at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking ballet “The Rite of Spring” in Paris in 1913. Stravinsky’s jarring music and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s equally jarring dances shocked audiences, who emerged in uproar, forcing Stravinsky to leave the theater. However, the show still went on, and despite the later characterization of the event as a riot, it is unclear if any actual violence occurred.