Adrian Dunbar: Audiences 'Don't Know About the Fourth Wall'

Actor Adrian Dunbar has said that today's audiences "don’t know about the fourth wall" and need to turn their devices off.

Speaking to The Times, Dunbar said it was “very distracting” to be on stage and see “one or two people whose faces are lit up”.

“It is a strange modern phenomenon,” he said. “Sometimes it’s people who haven’t been to the theatre before who just don’t get it. They don’t know about the fourth wall. They might think they’re watching TV and that they can step away from what’s happening. 

“Whereas actually the theatre is very much an engaged and a collective experience."

He also said that “We have a saying in Ireland, which is that it’s not the singer, it’s the audience that sings. In other words, the collective concentration of the audience is sometimes what makes things on stage great. 

“If a couple of people decide to bow out of that concentration, it breaks the magic. People need to be reminded of that, and definitely told to switch off their phones.”

The actor will be appearing in a musical for the first time this summer as Fred Graham in  Kiss Me, Kate at the Barbican, alongside Broadway legend Stephanie J. Block. 

He expressed concerns about the dancing required for the role. “I’m a very good dad dancer, I can throw a few shapes,” he said. “But I have yet to get in sync with a whole bunch of other people and get the moves right. That’s going to be a hard thing for me to do.”

Kiss Me, Kate is Cole Porter's musical version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The play’s outdated sexual politics will be tweaked to bring the show “forward into this century”, making it “palatable and maybe more interesting for a modern audience”.

“The relationship between the two of them is going to be feistier and more equal,” Dunbar explained. 

“But we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It works on a very nostalgic level, the piece. People will be coming to see that and we will deliver that totally. We just want to ease our way over some of the bumps in the road that the old script may have had.”

Kiss Me, Kate will run at the Barbican Theatre from June 4 - September 14. 

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