Football without crowds is financially destroying English game, which needs a transfusion of humanity in more ways than one
“It is your custom to receive my plays with the most generous and unrestrained applause,” wrote George Bernard Shaw to his audience in 1913. “You sometimes compel the performers to pause at the end of every line until your laughter has quieted down … Do you not think that the naturalness of the representation must be destroyed, and therefore your own pleasure greatly diminished, when the audience insists on taking part in it by shouts of applause and laughter? Can you not imagine how a play which has been rehearsed to perfection in dead silence must be upset, disjointed, and spun out to a wearisome length by an audience which refuses to enjoy it silently? Will you think me very ungrateful and unkind if I tell you that the more applause there is during the performance the angrier I feel with you for spoiling your enjoyment and my own?”
