Kemble's Riot

Covent Garden Theatre, 1809. Ticket prices have just been hiked up and the patrons are unhappy. Very unhappy.

Ostensibly about the power of personality and the Georgian fear of the mob, Kemble's Riot quite subtly tackles wider issues of privatisation and access to the arts. But it is also a study of the audience itself. Or ourselves, really, as the real life audience is asked to take on the role of the imagined audience: the rioters.

Adrian Bunting's Kemble's Riot is a conceptually interesting piece but suffers for its over-reliance on audience engagement. This demands charisma and encouragement from the actors, and Steve North, playing audience member Henry Clifford, manages to elicit some foot-stomping, chanting and jeering. But the dialogue between Henry and theatre-loving Mary (Julie Nash) is poor – lengthy and repetitive to the point of killing any spark that North manages to ignite.

Theatre owner John Kemble (Richard Hansell) needs to be a bit more despicable to provoke the sort of rabble that this play requires: it's too easy to feel a little sorry for him. Although Hansell's sometimes nuanced performance is enjoyable, it falls short of achieving the show's aim of inciting a mob mentality. At one point, Kemble declares that he must "open the eyes" of the public because otherwise they would just watch "bloody pantomime." This did cause a few murmurs of dissatisfaction in the audience but, actually, a little more of the pantomime villain wouldn't go amiss in Hansell's characterisation.