Tom Sutcliffe: A knife edge between real horror and mere bravura

There was an intriguing moment in Jonathan Kent's new production of Oedipus when Ralph Fiennes took in a deep breath, a little like a high-diver preparing for a complex dive, and then keened it out again. At first it was like an stove-top kettle coming to the boil – a high, wailing thread of sound – but then, as it carried on (for far longer than you would have thought physically possible), it deepened in resonance to become a roar, slowly growing in volume and ferocity.

And what was most intriguing was what immediately followed it. Ineffectively stifled giggles. Not everywhere, it has to be said, and not everyone by any means at all. But enough – scattered across the amphitheatre of the Olivier – to send out ripples of unease.

I'm guessing that there were quite a lot of people, like me, whose reaction to this moment had been balanced rather precariously on a knife edge, but which got a little shove over from those subversive snorts. Not helpful to a sense of cathartic tragedy, it has to be said, even if your reaction is one of outraged piety. And there's just not a lot of arguing with an ill-suppressed giggle – in part because we assume it to be an involuntary noise, released without the calculation of the giggler.

It wasn't necessarily bad news, either. People sometimes giggle when they're nervous – and this was a high-stakes moment, when Fiennes' seething, angry Oedipus was absorbing the scale of the horror that had just been revealed to him. Not only that, but screaming is always a high-stakes kind of thing for an actor to do – since it requires a real finesse about starting and finishing, not to mention the ability to match feeling to volume. In fact I was reminded of another bit of extreme vocal gymnastics I'd seen on the London stage – and another occasion when the audience were divided over how to react. When Jonathan Pryce played Hamlet in Richard Eyre's Royal Court production in the early 1980s, he took the bold (some would say reckless) decision to play the Ghost himself – heaving a guttural voice out of his diaphragm, as if he'd temporarily been possessed by his own father's spirit. Like Fiennes' howl it was a deeply unnerving thing to watch – trembling perpetually on the edge of the ridiculous but using the spasm of social terror it induced in the audience (Should we laugh? Was this a terrible miscalculation?) to refresh the sense of prickly-naped shock a more superstitious audience might have felt at the appearance of a ghost. I'm not sure that I've ever been closer to giggling at a moment of high tragedy – and yet for me Pryce's Hamlet remains the gold standard against which others are judged.

I don't think Fiennes will be a definitive Oedipus in quite the same way. To extend the diving metaphor, he pulled off the tuck and the double-somersault but messed up his entry. That long sustained noise struck me less as an authentic howl of pain than a kind of warning siren, designed to draw attention to a high-board extravagance. This is acting at the highest level, it said – and in saying that it temporarily pressed the character being played offstage altogether. Very few people in that audience were thinking, "This is the sound of Oedipus being split open by his own self-knowledge,",while quite a few, I imagine, were thinking "Oh this is Fiennes, going for gold". And in the end the involuntary, uncalculated noise of giggles decisively trumped the voluntary, calculated one. I don't think this is to Fiennes' discredit though. He could easily have opted for a lower degree of difficulty and played safe. Instead he took the risk and lost the bet. But this distinctly awkward moment in the theatre was a reminder of how narrow the gap can be between triumph and embarrassment.

Give Sarah a warm Scouse welcome

I don't know who it was who shouted out "Sarah ... you're over-hyped!" at Sarah Silverman's Hammersmith Apollo gig on Sunday night – but I wish there had been more like her. In fact, I was rather hoping for a modest riot by the end of the evening. I don't think I've ever seen a more desultory performance – material worn thin by repetition, under-rehearsed delivery, and, after around 40 minutes, she threw in the towel.

As the old joke has it, "it was terrible and there wasn't enough." The audience eventually coaxed her back for a singularly embarrassing "encore" – which consisted mostly of her expressing bemusement that we weren't satisfied.

In Liverpool recently, Steve Coogan discovered the hard way that Merseyside audiences don't keep their disappointment to themselves, but in Hammersmith, with a few heroic exceptions, the crowd was astonishingly meek. The Liverpudlians have it right. If we don't complain, loud and long, we deserve what we get.

* A Snowdonia sheep farmer, reportedly owed thousands by Tom Aikens' restaurant company which went into administration last Friday, was quoted the other day as saying that the chef's behaviour "had not been that of a gentlemen".

I make no comment about Aiken, pictured, but this shows an innocent faith in the credit-worthiness of gentlemen – many of whom have been notorious for their reluctance to pay tradesmen's bills. And the belief that it is somehow all right for the wealthy to keep the less wealthy waiting for what they are owed persists in business practice.

Legislation now makes it possible for small businesses to charge interest on late payments, but many are nervous to do so for fear of losing important contracts. Which party will be the first to toughen up in this area – and stop big companies twisting the arms of little ones to provide them with free credit?

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