Trafalgar Entertainment Fitting Senior Staff With Bodycams to Tackle Unruly Behaviour

Trafalgar Entertainment is fitting senior staff in its venues with bodycams as it tries to tackle a rise in antisocial behaviour in its venues, according to The Stage.

Trafalgar Entertainment is one of the UK's biggest theatre operators and operates 14 venues across the UK through Trafalgar Theatres.

The company told The Stage it was "seeing an increasing number of cases" where audience members have to be evicted from its theatres, which includes the Churchill Theatre in Bromley and the Orchard Theatre in Dartford.

A spokesperson for Trafalgar Entertainment told The Stage the company worked to deliver appropriate "customer service training to front-of-house staff to help them respond to, and hopefully resolve, any potential scenarios that could arise", including complaints, conflicting customer opinions and disturbances.

"Duty managers are also equipped with bodycams, which - along with the training - often helps to lower the temperature when customer interactions become heated," they said, revealing that bodycams had been introduced at the end of 2021, after the first lockdowns.

They added: "Unfortunately, however, we're seeing an increasing number of cases where no amount of staff training and polite but firm intervention can prevent a situation escalating to the point where a customer needs to be removed entirely, and for this we're becoming more reliant on contracted security staff to assist in these situations."

Recently, police were called to the Palace Theatre in Manchester when there was audience disruption to the show. There has been much public discussion about poor audience behaviour in theatres recently.

Theatre union Bectu has launched a new campaign, Anything Doesn't Go, to tackle increasing and extreme anti-social behaviour from UK theatre audiences. This is in response to a recent survey of more than 1,500 theatre workers, which found 90% of respondents had personal experiences of bullying, violence, intimidation, harassment or abuse at work from audience members.

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