The promoters of Barbaric Comedies have defended the Edinburgh Festival/Abbey Theatre co-production against claims that its violent and sexually explicit scenes have caused large numbers of the audience to walk out.
The Times said that on the opening night on Monday the King's Theatre was half full before the interval and a quarter full afterwards. The Daily Tele- graph said it was half full when the curtain went up and only a third full when it went down.
However, Ben Barnes, artistic director of the Abbey, says he saw only three walkouts on opening night and the number of walkouts had been "grossly exaggerated".
From this reviewer's position in the upper circle, there was no sign of anyone walking out or not returning after the interval.
Ms Jackie Westbrook, press and marketing director of the Edinburgh International Festival, said that "anecdotally" she had heard of walkouts, but added that there was no way of knowing why a person didn't return after an interval. "Maybe they were going for their bus."
Barbaric Comedies, a version by Frank McGuinness of an early 20th-century work by the Spanish writer ValleInclan, runs for four hours. There had been, she said, "not one single official complaint".
Reviews to which the Times referred in a news article about the production were mixed, but the article's implication that this was due to the sexually explicit scenes does not stand up.
Benedict Nightingale of the Times and Joyce McMillan of the Scotsman wondered, rather, whether such a dark, difficult work, which was, in McMillan's words, "not a lot of fun", could bring in enough people to justify the festival's investment.
Ms Westbrook describes booking for the show as "fine" and says no tickets have been cancelled because of these news reports. "It's almost new writing, and we wouldn't expect it to sell out in advance," she said. Certain critics did not like the kind of "director's theatre" which was favoured by the festival director, Brian McMaster, and she felt these news reports were part of that wave of criticism.
The explicit parts of the production include rape, sexual intercourse on stage and a priest masturbating. Ben Barnes says he takes the view of Mr McMaster that it is no stronger than what you would see in the cinema. "In the context of Edinburgh, it's important that we tackle something new, not just another Brecht or a Schiller," he added. He was not worried that this publicity would put Dublin audiences off when the show goes up at the Abbey during the Dublin Theatre Festival.
"One of the great things about Dublin audiences," he said, "is that they make up their own minds."