Pre-show music

Why don't more productions use music before the play starts?

Perhaps it's seen as a rather cheap device, something best left for the fringe, but personally I'm a real sucker for a well-chosen soundtrack blaring our while I wait for the houselights to dip.

The Soho Theatre  seem to choose their music particularly well. Piranha Heights was preceded by a stirring sequence include The Automatic's Monster and what I think might have been Hercules featuring Antony Hegarty (it was certainly his voice). The previous show I'd seen there, A Couple Of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, had fantastic East European heavy metal before curtain-up, taking me back to a trip to East Germany in 1990.

It can backfire, I suppose. When Happy Days was played at the interval of Beckett's Play of the same name at the National recently it really annoyed me. Set the tone, yes. Cheap gags, maybe not.

Keith Washington, who directed my monologue Katherine, used calypso music to set the scene. And then At The River as the lights went down. I heard it in a cafe the other day and it sent a shiver down my spine, taking me back to those spine-tingling moments as the audience starts to hush.

For The Death Of Margaret Thatcher I suggested using a recording of her reading the Gettysburg Address set to music by Aaron Copeland. Quite strange to hear that voice saying things like "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history." But June Abbott, the director, decided in the end that silence suited the production better and she was probably right.

On the whole, though, while I'm a big fan of silence during a play, I think loud music before it starts is almost always a good idea.