Breaking the fourth wall

What happens when you break the fourth wall, in the theatre, culture, and life …?

There’s a fantastic moment in the first episode of House of Cards when Kevin Spacey, as the Machiavellian politician Francis Underwood, on finding an injured dog in the road, turns to face the camera and says “Moments like this require someone who will act, do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing.” The trope used throughout the series invites the audience to glimpse the psychopathic workings of Underwood’s mind, and perhaps become complicit in it. But it is particularly impactful the first time around because it creates an element of shock – we don’t expect to be addressed directly and we see, for the first time, the two sides to Underwood’s character, the difference between his public-facing and private personas. The defining theme of the series.

In the theatre, the traditional haven of the fourth wall – the proscenium arch between actors and audience – the fourth wall is there to help us suspend disbelief. A different world which, unlike in film and tv, cannot completely be reconstructed in a realistic way. If we, as the audience, can allow ourselves to accept the fourth wall, what is going on on the stage becomes real to us. But there are times in theatre when the fourth wall is broken. There are plenty of examples when an actor has broken the fourth wall to ask a member of the audience to turn off their mobile phone. Recently, the actor Andrew Scott noticed a member of the audience working on their laptop while he was performing in the title role of Hamlet. On these occasions, the interruption alarms the audience and jolts them back to reality. But the actor does it when they feel it is necessary to break the fourth wall. They do it to make sure the fourth wall continues to exist. The theatre needs the fourth wall so much more than tv and cinema, so it’s even more important to protect it.

The fourth wall also exists in life, it exists in order for us to do the tasks that we need to do and for people to give us the space and respect to do that. I remember once as a young communications consultant presenting on behalf of a media literacy education charity to representatives from the beauty industry. We wanted the industry to support us so that we could produce a suite of education materials about ‘airbrushing’ (it was back in the early 2000s) and the impact that might have on young girls’ expectations of themselves. The representatives came to the meeting, but they were not up for it. I was talking about the government’s criticism of airbrushing when one lady from a very well-known global brand muttered audibly in decidedly spicey language that the government (and we) were talking out of our backsides. For a moment I was lost for words, this lady’s behaviour was so out of form for a respectable workplace meeting, and my client was sitting next to me, and this woman’s comment could very easily derail the entire strategy. Swallowing my panic, I cleared my throat and asked whether there was a problem she wanted to discuss. A painful few moments… But, if she hadn’t said anything, the elephant in the room wouldn’t have been addressed, everyone would have listened politely and then they would have gone away and we would have never heard from them again. We ended up teaming up with the beauty industry, and the airbrushing lessons were eventually rolled out in secondary schools across the UK.

The fourth wall can be broken in a moment of  crisis, to right something that is going wrong. A friend, a successful news journalist, had moved to the UK to start up in financial PR. One day, he galvanized all his creativity to pitch a client’s non-story to a news desk (it was back in the days when we used to call them up). The journalist snapped ‘why would I even write a story about this rubbish?’. ‘I’m just doing my job, I used to be a journalist too,’ my friend replied. ‘I broke the fourth wall,’ he said to me later.  Many frustrated PRs have yearned to say the same thing, but haven’t been able to, because of the fourth wall – the rules of engagement – in the process of PR pitching. It was extremely cathartic for my friend to break that fourth wall in that moment. He was able to get rid of months of frustration, the frustration of being regarded as the lesser party by journalists, even though he had years of experience as a front line crime reporter up his sleeve. He was able to say what all PRs want to say – that we work brilliant things with our material. Sometimes that material is excellent, other times less so, but we can only work with what we have. My friend who is a very successful PR, has always had a great sense of timing. I admired his bravery in calling out the journalist for being rude.

But imagine if all PRs broke the fourth wall, all the time? No story would ever get sold. The relationship between journalist and PR would break down. And the public relations industry would be on its knees. Remember the famous ‘Ratner moment’ when CEO Gerald Ratner referred to one of the jewelry company’s products as being ‘total crap’. That comment spelt the end of his career, and the end of the business. It’s been acknowledged that this was one of the worst PR mistakes ever made.

If we were to describe what the fourth wall is, moving beyond the literal of the entertainment industry, we could say it is a not-acknowledged contract between two parties (professional, personal, institutional), that accepts that there are some rules of engagement that allow us to suspend reality to a greater or lesser extent to make that interaction work. Viewed in that way, the fourth wall is an important part of society. It is there when a politician campaigns during an election (imagine the legwork the recent Tory government had to do during the last election campaign, trying to sell new ideas and the concept of hope after fourteen years in power); it is there during online dating (when couples chat about their favourite TV shows but are in fact auditioning each other as a future life partner); it is there during the pitching process. We can’t really afford for the fourth wall to break down, but it can be fantastic to challenge it, judiciously, for impact, to shock and to change things, or even to make sure we maintain the status quo, when the moment is right.

August 2024