'Show Reports provided by Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) from their touring schools shows between 2017 and 2019, and an interview with Drew discussing her memories of audience responses to these performances, contribute to better understanding of the impact of theatre in young people's lives in regional Victoria. Using discourse analysis, I examine here the variations between regional and urban young audiences in the commentary available in these Show Reports, in order to suggest that they provide qualitative data of significance to audience research. In researching young audiences, Willmar Sauter states that young people aged under twenty 'are more interested in the fictional story presented on stage, whereas interest in the actors and staging increases steadily with the age of the spectator'. Elizabeth Belfiore and Oliver Bennett have also contended that theatre-goers become more sophisticated 'in their appreciation' of theatre with age, as they develop more concrete skills in decoding cultural artefacts. This framing of cultural sophistication, which Belfiore and Bennett directly link to Pierre Bourdieu's idea of 'cultural capital', is used to explain differences in access and appreciation of cultural commodities. Bourdieu is commonly drawn into discussions of how young people do or do not engage with theatre because of his influential ideas about social formation and differentiation, which makes cultural capital particularly useful to this discussion on the varieties of audience response. THE STAGE MANAGER: In 2009, Helen Freshwater recognised that the previous 'dearth' of empirical studies privileging the audience had shifted, identifying a trend in other disciplines to focus on the active audience voice. From the perspective of Kirsty Sedgman, Theatre Studies must ask what 'good' theatre audience research might look like. For some researchers, such as Matthew Reason, this involves using surveys or post-performance workshops where the experiences of participants are examined through visual, oral, written and performance-based activities. While access to the experience of young people is vital to any reception study, the responses collected in a workshop model require careful ethics clearance, resulting in reduced numbers of research participants. [...] data can also be influenced by young people's tendency towards what John Tulloch describes as the 'red pen effect' - an expectation of pleasing the researcher that can lead to compromised results. On the other hand, although many audiences obey the 'rules' of theatre, not all young people are aware of these rules and may act more freely - at times calling out, booing and commenting as they might at other social, cultural and sporting events. I have suggested above that Drew be considered an audience expert because the Show Reports provide detailed data about audiences.' (Publication abstract)
