Microphones should not replace the ability to project

You’ve got to hand it to Robert Icke. The 29 year-old constantly enlivens British theatre. You’ve only got to watch the radical production of David Hare’s The Red Barn with which he made his National Theatre debut to feel the force of an original mind at play. It turns a stage into a cinematic space, not quite a film, but definitely using the tricks of the movie thriller to invigorate the theatrical experience.

And it is staggeringly slow in the way it reveals its truths; stark and formal. Which is a bold move for a director who revealed just before it opened that he habitually walks out of plays at the interval all the time, finding much of what he sees boring. Perhaps, I thought meanly, that’s why The Red Barn didn’t have an interval.

I am old enough to remember the days when people used to flinch in horror when amplification was used

I loved The Red Barn but I don’t like all Icke’s productions (his Uncle Vanya had a revolve that made me want to intervene with an oil can; it also had two intervals which were very tempting opportunities for departure.) But I love his passion and his willingness to speak his mind.

Which brings me to his other controversial notion expressed to The Times. He believes in using microphones. They were in use at the Lyttelton for The Red Barn, to ensure that all 900 of us could hear properly. And very effective they were too.

In theory, I am absolutely in favour of this. I am old enough to remember the days when people used to flinch in horror when amplification was used, even for musicals. But that reluctance to mic meant a lot of words emerged unheard, with a resulting sense of frustration in the viewers. I’ve suffered too in straight theatre from sitting in the cheap seats up in the amphitheatre or at the back of a cavernous space and watching a performance pitched entirely to the front stalls, with just half lines floating through and all sense lost.

There is something wonderful about hearing an actor in full un-mic'd flow

And yet and yet. There is something wonderful about hearing an actor in full un-mic'd flow. I remember watching Paul Scofield in The Alchemist, standing at the back of the Olivier, on a student standby entry, and hearing every word he said. You could ride the rich, orotund sounds he made. It was a wonder.

If the increasing use of microphones means that actors lose that ability to project, it will be a loss. There is something magnificent about the unamplified human voice. I should be sorry to say goodbye to its sonorous glory.