Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, November 6, 2002


CLAP AS IF YOU LIFE DEPENDS ON IT


SOMETIMES, at the end of a good concert, the random applause of the audience mysteriously combines into a single, rhythmic beat and everyone claps in unison and finds it hard to stop. It always reminds me of the Playschool song: ``If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands...'' I have been to one or two plays where almost noone clapped, which made me feel bad for the actors. The sound of one hand clapping is death in a theatre. In the US - where else? - audience clappers are planted in stinker shows to give the applause a boost. Odd, since Americans would applaud the snapping of a violin string. I have also been to concerts of experimental music that were so disjointed and full of silences, it was hard to know whether the orchestra had stopped or was just pausing. When they did finally stop, there was stunned silence, followed by a smattering of uncertain clapping, suddenly erupting into shouts of Bravo!, as if covering the embarrassment of not understanding a note. A group of friends recently went to the opera Don Giovanni just to see the ABC weathergirl Kirsti Harms, done up to the nines as an anguished Donna Elvira. Strange that she is better known for doing the weather than for being a fine soprano - such is the looking glass world of TV celebrity. Opera singers once had bowsprit bosoms - the larger the bosom, the louder the volume - but the new generation of singers such as Kirsti are slender athletes by comparison, and can actually act, too. Anyway, all that aside, things went well in Don G and afterwards the audience expressed its appreciation with thunderous applause and even a bit of very un-Adelaide cheering. At my own restrained pace, I counted a minimum of 500 claps; the average was probably 600; and a real enthusiast might have exceeded 700. The applause lasted at least four minutes, at the end of which the surge of enthusiasm began to wane, a natural ebb related to having sore palms as much as anything. Yet the cast stayed on stage for more applause. The judgement of these things is a delicate matter - you do not want to be still standing there longer than the clapping. I hate repeated curtain calls and encores beyond what is deserved. Ballet is notorious for it. I mean, we don't double or treble tip at restaurants. But we have yet to reach the desperate state of the Communist Party district conference in Moscow, as reported by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. At meeting's end, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for and of course everyone stood up and the hall echoed with stormy applause for four minutes, five, and continued. Stalin's goons watched to see who would stop clapping first. Eight minutes. Nine. Ten. No one dared stop. Then, after eleven minutes, an official on the podium suddenly sat down exhausted. That same night, he was arrested and spent the next 10 years in the Gulag. Do not be the first to stop applauding.