Choruses of approval

Curtain calls can be curiously competitive, with the cast often elbowed out by the creative team. Will Elton John be able to resist taking a bow after Billy Elliot? Unlikely, says Alan Strachan

Few issues in the theatre are more divisive - both backstage and in the auditorium - than that unscripted but curiously crucial climax to the main event, the curtain call. Some actors and directors (and audiences, too) detest them, while others relish the chance to applaud or bask in acclaim. Although booing is still heard in the opera house (it's virtually a fixture at ENO openings these days), it seems to have vanished, along with the gallery, from the theatre.

Few issues in the theatre are more divisive - both backstage and in the auditorium - than that unscripted but curiously crucial climax to the main event, the curtain call. Some actors and directors (and audiences, too) detest them, while others relish the chance to applaud or bask in acclaim. Although booing is still heard in the opera house (it's virtually a fixture at ENO openings these days), it seems to have vanished, along with the gallery, from the theatre.

Battles often rage over the final order of appearance. It is difficult to imagine anyone - or anything - holding Elton John back from taking the stage at the end of the forthcoming Billy Elliot musical, for which he composed the music. In musicals, the wattage of the evening can spill over into the calls, which gives directors or choreographers the chance to stage curtain calls almost as additional numbers. In the 1970s Broadway production of Applause, which was adapted from the backstage story All About Eve, the director Ron Field devised a call as star-worship, with the massed company parting to reveal the diva-figure of Lauren Bacall emerging from her character as spotlights bathed her. By contrast, the Cabaret director Hal Prince, usually so sure-footed, bizarrely, after closing scenes of abortion, disillusion and Nazi thuggery, had his cast line up for a jolly, irony-free reprise of Cabaret's title-number, to somewhat jarring effect.

Curtain calls after comedy can also capitalise on the show's energy. The Comédie Française's Jacques Charon, directing Feydeau's breathless farce A Flea in Her Ear for the National Theatre, came up with a bravura footnote to the frolic by including Albert Finney in his double-role of manservant and boulevardier - using accelerating appearances and reappearances (once from the fireplace) in his alternate costumes, sending the audience out on a euphoric high.

Trevor Nunn, at the RSC, pulled off an energetic coup, too, in the Hollywood satire Once in a Lifetime, staging even the calls with the zest of a musical and bringing the large cast together for a climactic run to the footlights from upstage. Indeed, for a period it became a company trademark and eventual cliché; even, it seemed, after the grimmest RSC Shakespearean tragedy, a serried rank of maimed, blinded or bloodied thespians would come hurtling downstage toward a startled audience.

With serious work, the post-curtain mood is harder to gauge. Some directors would happily dispense with calls, and few contemporary actors have the chutzpah of Sir Donald Wolfit, who would totter on after playing Lear or Macbeth as if physically and spiritually drained, clutching the curtain for support. He was alert enough, however, when once, after announcing the following night's performance of Hamlet, in which he would play the Prince "while my dear wife will play Ophelia", an irreverent voice from the gallery yelled, "Your wife's an old bag!" Wolfit, still seemingly spent, paused only fractionally before replying: "Nevertheless, tomorrow night she will play Ophelia."

It is hard today to imagine any actor milking applause as fragrantly as Wolfit or Marlene Dietrich, who rippled the curtain from behind to presage her appearance and who dressed for her calls - which could last longer than her actual shows - in a long fur cape that seemed to have used the world's supply of ermine pelts.

A call such as Peter Hall staged for Piaf is a rare modern instance of the call as brazen star-apotheosis, with a hapless supporting cast retreating to the stage perimeter to herald - then "spontaneously" eight times a week join in the applause for - Elaine Paige, whose demeanour at her call was described as suggesting one only just dismounted from the cross.

A splendid exemplar of the fine art of handling applause is Maggie Smith, who seems to receive a kind of mental blood-transfusion and to bloom in emergence from character to actor during the reception: "They're ovating again" she would rejoice in the wings before sweeping on to accept Broadway's standing ovations for Lettice and Lovage (on the sole occasion when, unaccountably, only a scattered few rose to their feet, she was heard to mutter to her fellow actors: "Oh dear, deep sarcasm!").

The rigidly hierarchical Shaftesbury Avenue call is a vanishing phenomenon. A major change, too, has been the loss of the author's call and speech on the first nights of new plays. Some dramatists relished them. George Bernard Shaw, unsurprisingly, could barely wait for the cry of "Author!" to leap on to the stage. Oscar Wilde, too, exploited his limelight moments. After Lady Windermere's Fan, he strolled on from the wings, cigarette dangling in mauve-gloved fingers, green carnation in his buttonhole. Not for Wilde the pleasantries of thanking the cast and director; instead, he congratulated the audience on "the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do".

Noël Coward's curtain speeches could rival Wilde's. After triumphs, he would toss off "Noëlisms" to an adoring public, apparently acting as the spokesman for the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age or the cheerleader for pre-war patriotism ("You must admit it is still a pretty exciting thing to be English," he declared after Cavalcade). After flops, he would bound on "with my usual misguided vigour". After the vapid Home Chat he received the gallery's shouts of, "We expected better!" with the retort, "So did I."

On Broadway, where there has been no similar authorial tradition, Coward foolishly defied convention in a revival of Tonight at 8.30 when not only did he praise the production but then led forward his protégé-lover Graham Payn at the expense of the co-star Gertrude Lawrence. Payn was panned and the show was a rapid flop.

The high-adrenalin moment of the call created a scandal in London, too, after the family chronicle Dear Octopus, when the author, Dodie Smith, came on stage to face an unexpected display of spite from the star Dame Marie Tempest, who was a public favourite but a despotic old trout who had taken against the much younger Smith.

There are no comparable on-stage dramas these days. One tradition has been creeping back, however. Possibly feeling downgraded against their colleagues in opera or ballet (where first-night calls remain the convention for directors, choreographers and designers) "the creative team" on big musicals have been regularly joining opening-night calls, most noticeably at Andrew Lloyd Webber shows.

Sadly, these moments are always maladroitly handled; after the precision-drilled set calls there tends to be an uneasy hiatus while the company's eyes swivel to the wings, from which eventually a distinctly furtive group emerge like rabbits blinking into car headlamps. Even after The Producers the wattage in Drury Lane perceptibly dipped when the team entered into the delirium of Nathan Lane's reception; Mel Brooks's speech seemed anticlimactic.