Philip Hensher: Silence can be golden in our critical world

Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, Love Never Dies, a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, opened in London last week. The original Phantom opened in 1986, and since then an enormous phenomenon has transformed our lives: the internet. In 1986, strange to say, if you wanted to find out what a theatre production was like, you read a critic's view, or you called a theatre-going friend and asked what he thought about it.

Now, you just log on, and internet critics have no qualms about writing about a show while it is still in preview; about insulting it; about setting hand to keyboard despite the fact that it may be the only theatre trip they've made in five years. Lord Lloyd-Webber was disapproving the other day about the lack of restraint bloggers and contributors to forums have shown while the musical is still being shaped.

Some internet critics, clearly, are only worth totting up to discover what the general opinion on something is. Others, just as clearly, are witty and well-informed writers who could easily persuade someone to pay them for their thoughts. The West End Whingers website remarked of Love Never Dies that its dramatic climax occurs, disappointingly, when a jacket is thrown down a stairwell, before coining the now legendarily insulting three-word review, Paint Never Dries. They will go far.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, the critic Alex Ross was in town last week to give the Royal Philharmonic Society lecture. He devoted it to the subject of applause in classical music concerts. There are a good many conventions about the intrusion of applause in live performance, some rather recherché – in the best opera houses, one does not applaud the first act of Parsifal, but just files out absurdly for one's sacerdotal G and T. Ross pointed out that until very recently people used to applaud between movements of symphonies, and indeed used to demand encores.

He has a point: the muted coughing which greets the end of the first movement of the Emperor concerto would have bemused Beethoven. On the other hand, you wouldn't want it to become automatic whenever silence occurs. Sometimes you do want to think, and not listen to someone yelling "bravo" at a string quartet. Young people, Ross suggested, are put off by the conventional restraint on their expressions of enthusiasm. If they can't applaud till an accepted point, they would rather not go.

We seem to be going through a transition in articulating relations between audience and artist. Audiences seem to be demanding more rights: to applaud, shriek and interrupt; to take telephone calls, mid-Hamlet; to write in the most insulting ways without fear of comeback; to have their views taken into account. It seems an almost irresistible force. Even a rock group as powerful as Pink Floyd had to take their record label to court to defend their rights against the pressures of the internet. EMI wanted to make the tracks of Dark Side of the Moon, an album conceived and performed as a whole, available for separate downloading. For the moment, EMI was prevented from doing so.

The unleashing of audience power on the internet has had beneficial effects. No one would book a hotel now without looking at the comments on tripadvisor.com; as a price-comparison mechanism, it is unprecedentedly effective. In the realms of artistic endeavour, however, I wonder how far it can go. Can an audience that believes in its right to intervene noisily, both online and in the Wigmore Hall, be said to be an audience at all?

Don't blame Philip for his latest gaffe

The dear old Duke of Edinburgh, in Exeter last week, met a sea cadet who said she worked in a club. Quick as a flash, the Duke asked if it were a strip club, before observing that it was probably too cold for that and moving on to the next awestruck punter.

This is traditionally the opportunity for the newspaper columnist to run through a selection of the Duke's gaffes, so here goes: "No wonder you're deaf, standing near that racket", "Do you have slitty eyes yet?", "You're too fat to be an astronaut" (to a 13-year-old boy), and, my favourite, to a blind person with a guide dog, "I hear they've got eating dogs for anorexics nowadays."

Driven mad with boredom and state visits, the Duke can't be blamed for being mildly rude to people on infrequent occasions. But it seems harsh to blame him for this one. The newspapers are full of tales of students and other young people seeking to make ends meet by taking jobs in the sex industry. To the ducal ears, the success of the "Belle de Jour" blog, about a researcher in child health who earned her living in prostitution, may have come as a surprise. Is it the Duke's fault if he gains the impression from the media that many healthy-looking young people, in a recession and with the threat of spending cuts, are resorting to taking their clothes off in public?

These folklore fanatics are a fire hazard

The cheese rolling was cancelled this week, on the grounds of health and safety. If you've never heard of it, it takes place at the terrifyingly steep Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire. A cheese is rolled down a hill, and dozens of people chase after it, rolling arse over tip, as my grandmother used to say. Invariably, many of them break their limbs.

Self-destruction seems a common theme in many of these supposedly ancient customs. In Ottery St Mary in Devon, men, women and children run through the streets on 5 November holding blazing barrels of tar, lightly singeing the faces of the populace who get too close. Bog snorkelling, invented as recently as the 1970s, sounds like an invitation to gastroenteritis.

Another pyromaniac festival with its origins lost in the mists of the mid-19th century is Up Helly Aa in Shetland. And, of course, there was the charmingly named Darkie Day, which was still taking place in Padstow in the 21st century. I don't know whether lynching was part of the entertainment, or just part of the spirit of this event, but folklore and aggression often seem to meet in these cherished happenings.

Speaking as one overcome by nauseous sensations at the slightest suggestion of a morris dance breaking out in a pub car park, I think the only reason for cheese rolling and the like to continue is that it promises to remove a few folklore enthusiasts from civilised society for a few weeks.