Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage - bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back... The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of 'theatre etiquette': an audience-led crusade to bring 'manners and respect' back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as 'reasonable' within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.

We're living in an age of division. From abortion rights to immigration, gun control to climate change, civil debate has gone out the window. Manners, order, and respect are being eroded. Why can't we all be reasonable? The trouble is, what's 'reasonable' to one person is outrageous to another. Is it okay to let children play in the garden while others are working from home? To do your makeup on a train, or recline your seat on an aeroplane? What's the right way to breastfeed? To protect your neighbourhood? To protest against injustice and oppression? In a world where we all think we're being reasonable, how can we figure out what's right? Looking back through history and around the world, Kirsty Sedgman set out to discover how unfairness and discrimination got baked into our social norms, dividing us along lines of gender, class, disability, sexuality, race... Instead of measuring human behaviour against outdated standards of rules and reason, On Being Unreasonable argues that sometimes we need to act unreasonably to bring about positive change.

We're living in an age of division. From abortion rights to immigration, gun control to climate change, civil debate has gone out the window. Manners, order, and respect are being eroded. Why can't we all be reasonable? The trouble is, what's 'reasonable' to one person is outrageous to another. Is it okay to let children play in the garden while others are working from home? To do your makeup on a train, or recline your seat on an aeroplane? What's the right way to breastfeed? To protect your neighbourhood? To protest against injustice and oppression? In a world where we all think we're being reasonable, how can we figure out what's right? Looking back through history and around the world, Kirsty Sedgman set out to discover how unfairness and discrimination got baked into our social norms, dividing us along lines of gender, class, disability, sexuality, race... Instead of measuring human behaviour against outdated standards of rules and reason, On Being Unreasonable argues that sometimes we need to act unreasonably to bring about positive change.

How do audiences experience live performances? What is gained when a national theatre is born? These questions and more are the subject of Locating the Audience, the first in-depth study of how people form relationships with a new theatre company. Investigating the inaugural season of National Theatre Wales, Kirsty Sedgman explores how different people felt about the way their communities were 'engaged' and their places 'performed' by the theatre's productions. Mapping the complex interplay between audience experience and identity, the book presents a significant contribution to our contemporary project of defining cultural value. Rather than understanding value as an end point, 'impact', Sedgman makes the provocative claim that cultural value can better be understood as a process.