"It's my birthday tomorrow," confides Laura Marling as her set nears its end, and the sardine-tight audience serenades her with a massed Happy Birthday.
The man who sang "Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter", said his role would be about delivering "the Astraeus message and business proposition directly to what is a relatively tight and targeted audience of people and decision-makers in aviation.
Perhaps the Beast's wooing scene could be tighter (although the audience interaction is nice), and I'm not entirely convinced that Amalia Vitale and Carly Davis's terrible twins – who keep reminding us that Belle's goodness can make her seem a bit of a creep – quite deserve their stony fate.
Either you hold an audience, so tight that it feels lashed to the seats, or you don't.
Although the tight space puts the audience in uncomfortable intimacy with this simmering encounter, the eruption, when it arrives, feels as perfunctory as what has come before.
It is customary to describe film directors who keep a tight rein on their audience's responses, who coldly and meticulously manipulate emotion, as sadists.
Part of the reason is convention: plays tend to take advantage of the emotional claustrophobia of the theatre, trapping the characters and the audience within tight limits of time and place.
At the same time the audience are tight against the perimeter, as in a boxing ring, for which reason Jonathan Pryce said that the previous version was the scariest stage he knew.
A woman in the audience, wearing tight chinos, T-shirt, tube socks, and tennis shoes, motioned toward the candidate's wife with her chin and whispered to the man beside her, "She doesn't look like she's having any fun at all".
Second, and just as important, the needs of the reader must be considered: On the whole, shorter papers tend to be read by more people, and if the goal is to reach an interdisciplinary audience, a tight length limit is always desirable.
It also keeps a tighter leash on its audience, which is firmly led along designated routes and divided into small and then smaller groups.
