Apparently “Don’t Pee in Your Cup” is Now Part of Theatre Etiquette

by Chris Peterson

According to a recent report about life working front-of-house in London theatres, ushers are dealing with audience members vomiting over balconies, taking their shoes and socks off, engaging in sexual activity during performances and, in one especially memorable case, handing an usher a pint cup filled with urine.

I have questions.

First and foremost: What the hell is happening in West End theatres?

Because here in the US, Broadway audiences have certainly been testing everyone's patience lately. People pull out their phones. They talk through performances. They sing when nobody asks them to.

Someone apparently thought it was appropriate to shout The Pitt references at Isa Briones while she was trying to perform Just in Time.

All bad.

But at least we're not urinating into cups. At least I don't think we are.

And obviously I'm joking here, because interrupting performers, filming shows, screaming references at actors, and treating ushers like garbage isn't somehow acceptable simply because nobody has handed them a container of bodily fluid afterward.

That's an extremely low bar for Broadway to clear.

Still, reading some of these West End stories makes our audience etiquette debates feel almost quaint.

One longtime usher recalled being handed a plastic pint cup filled with warm urine. Another theatre worker described someone vomiting over a balcony and then vomiting again on the usher who came to help. Workers have also described sexual activity taking place during performances.

And I cannot stress this enough: we're talking about theatres.

The troubling part is that these aren't simply a handful of ridiculous stories collected over several decades. Bectu surveyed more than 1,000 theatre and live-event workers and found that 77% of front-of-house respondents had experienced antisocial behavior, aggression, violence or harassment from audience members during the previous year.

So beneath all the jokes about urine cups, there's actually something pretty serious happening.

Audience behavior appears to be getting worse. And I do wonder whether the theatre industry has accidentally helped create some of this.

For years, we've correctly tried to dismantle the idea that attending theatre requires some elaborate etiquette ceremony. You don't need to wear a tuxedo. You don't need to whisper during intermission. Nobody needs to pretend they're visiting Buckingham Palace because they bought a ticket to Wicked.

Theatre should feel welcoming for everyone. But I'm starting to wonder whether "you don't have to be formal" somehow became "there are absolutely no rules anymore."

Frankly, alcohol appears to be a major driver of this, particularly in West End theatres where drinks are frequently encouraged and sometimes delivered directly to audience members at their seats. Theatres need alcohol to drive a profit. But permissively allowing easy access to all the drinks a person can consume at their seats does run counter to the ideal theatre experience.

Again, I'm not anti-drinking at the theatre. Have a cocktail. Have two. But if the evening reaches the point where you're calculating whether your empty pint glass can double as emergency plumbing, perhaps you've had enough.

Broadway shouldn't get smug about any of this, either. We've seen plenty of terrible audience behavior here.

But the larger problem is the same. Some audience members increasingly seem to believe that buying a ticket means buying permission to behave however they want.

So theatre audiences, we've got plenty to work on.

Put the phones away.). Stop shouting things at actors. Stop singing unless the production explicitly invites you to. Basically, stop treating theatre like a sporting event (and actually we should be behaving better at games too.) 

And please stop peeing in cups.