Record Attendance

A staggering clinical experiment, in which English Psychologist K. O. Newman acted as his own guinea pig, is recorded in Two Hundred and Fifty Times I Saw a Play (Pelagos Press, Oxford; $1). Moreover, Newman saw the play--Terence Rattigan's Flare Path--at successive performances, always sitting in the same third-row aisle seat.

Newman's reason was "to find out things never noticed before"; his reaction, "truly incredible boredom." The most trying period was "the latter half of the first 25 performances. Then I got my second wind." Newman learned to sleep open-eyed, but the slightest deviation from the script would wake him up "with a jerk." Slight differences in intonation or timing came to be "minor events." When Newman occasionally slipped out for a breath of air, "the actors who resented my continuous presence most . . . objected to my temporary absence even more." The acting, Newman found, was highly intermittent. He noted many missed cues and cases of "drying up," found that five times in six weeks one actor failed to show up on the stage on time.

Audiences were almost never alert to such real crises, but on the other hand were upset by trifles: their most violent reaction (lasting an entire act) was to an actor's inadvertently addressing a commissioned officer as a noncom. Audiences in general, Newman decided, have an "average mental age" of between 16 and 17.

Newman sent his book to George Bernard Shaw, got back this comment: "It would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement."

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