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ON THEATRE AND CINEMA— UNIVERSAL tudes of audiences — past and present — are not easy to describe. It would appear that Grote's famous description of the Athenian audience in his History of Greece1 is perhaps somewhat too rosy when one compares it with the more detailed analysis by Haigh or Professor Thomson. The latter has given a specifically striking illustration when he writes: 'How, we are led to ask, did an Athenian audience react to the performance of their tragedies? In our own London theatres, the members of the audience usually keep their emotional reactions (other than laughter) to themselves; but in the cinemas of the west of Ireland, where the spectators are peasants, the atmosphere is far more intense. At the critical moments of the plot, almost every face wears a terrified look and continuous sobbing may be heard. In this respect, an Athenian would undoubtedly have felt more at home in the west of Ireland than in the West End of London. In one of Plato's dialogues (10, 535), a professional reciter of the Homeric poems describes the effect of his performances on himself and on his audience:
'When I am describing something pitiful, my eyes fill with tears; when something terrible or strange, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs . . . And whenever I look down from the platform at the audience, I see them weeping, with a wild look in their eyes, lost in wonder at the words they hear.'
'This', Professor Thomson concludes, 'was a recital of Homer. At the dramatic festivals the excitement must have been even greater. No wonder there was a panic in the theatre at the first performance of the Eumenides .;' Two points in this admirable interpretation are of interest to the sociologist. First, the direct contact between actor and audience and their reciprocal relationship — the latter fact is the most important difference between theatre and cinema — second, that, in spite of this difference, Professor Thomson does not hesitate to compare the contemporary cinema (in the west of Ireland) with the theatrical audiences in the Athenian city-state.
Perhaps we should add here a passage from Aristotle's Politics,2 which supports this description of the Athenian audience. Aristotle deals in this chapter with an inquiry concerning harmony and rhythm: '. . . all music which has the power of purifying the soul affords a harmless pleasure to man. Such, therefore, should be the harmony and such the music which those who contend with each other in the theatre should exhibit; but as the audience is composed of
1 See particularly vol. VIII, Everyman edit., p. 287.
2 VIII, 7.
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