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| | Telegraph | Arts |
 | | When Simon Callow started the play by stepping between the curtains and addressing the audience as if it were composed of the ladies of the Chichester Women's Institute, a silence descended, not a silence of concentration but heavy, inert and rancorous. |
 | | There was a fat man in the front row, he said, who stared fixedly at him during the curtain call, and gave him a very personal slow handclap, which he continued after everyone else had stopped clapping - the worst audience, he said, the worst audience he'd ever - absolutely the worst. |
 | | He has a laugh that could fill, or perhaps empty, a cathedral, it is a cheering noise, it comes from a deep relish of the awfulness of life as well as of its pleasures. |
| www.telegraph.co.uk /arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/01/21/btgray21.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/01/21/ixartright.html (1158 words) |
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