‘Things were being thrown at us!’ Is booing at the theatre actually a good thing?

It is one of the most electrifying and unsettling sounds in theatre. Should we be encouraging crowds to do it more? Experts tell us about booing’s origins – and actors remember being on the receiving end of audience outrage

Panto season is just about over and we’ve booed the baddies to our hearts’ content. But as the curtain falls on this distinctive sound until next Christmas, should we consider jeering more often? This is not a call for more of the antisocial chomping, swiping, swilling, peeing or worse that have made the headlines recently. It is an inquiry into the old – and possibly fine – tradition of collective dissent, expressed in the once almighty audience “boo”.

In pantomime, such protests have little sting – they are so infused with obliging bonhomie that we may as well be clapping. The more straight-faced, incendiary boo of displeasure has been all but silenced, bar lone tuts or harrumphs. But for centuries, theatregoing etiquette allowed for heckles and hisses alongside cheers and whistles, all permissible within the great debating chamber of drama.