China Doll will open two weeks late, with Al Pacino reportedly using an earpiece to feed him lines – and he wouldn’t be the first star to need technical assistance

In Misery, the Broadway adaptation of the Stephen King novel, Bruce Willis plays a writer imprisoned by Laurie Metcalf’s psychotic fan. He is stripped of his dignity, mobility and artistic free will.

But at least he gets to keep his earpiece.

Rumours have swirled that Willis, who is making his Broadway debut, has been wearing an earpiece that feeds him his lines while the play is in previews. A note from the press representative confirmed that indeed “an earpiece was used as a safety net”.

Sharp-sighted spectators have also spotted a Bluetooth embedded in Al Pacino’s ear during previews for China Doll and the New York Post has reported that there are no fewer than seven teleprompters dotted around the set to help him with his cues. And just a few doors down, Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones are both using earpieces as the cantankerous oldsters in The Gin Game, according to various accounts. (It is widely acknowledged that Tyson used an earpiece on The Trip to Bountiful, but she still walked away with the Tony award for featured actress in a play.)

Two-week delayed opening of David Mamet's China Doll raises eyebrows Read more

There has been plenty of grumbling on message boards and sidewalks, with disgruntled theatre fans insisting that a key duty of an actor is to learn his or her lines. But just what is so terrible about a little wireless assistance?

Well, in some ways, acting is related to athletics. (Antonin Artaud called actors “athletes of the heart”.) Theatre and games are both live events, performed by bodies in real time, and most of us have an innate distaste for anything that smacks of cheating. If we won’t allow a swipe of Vaseline on a slide ball or a steroid shot in the arm of its pitcher, we may feel the same revulsion at actors who have extra help. Still, prompting is not illegal and has long been a part of the theatre. Perhaps earpieces can be seen as a less obtrusive resource than halting a scene to shout, “Line!”

Maybe we also ought to consider degrees of difficulty, in the way that judges at a diving or a figure skating competition might. Some lines are harder to learn than others. Comic banter is easy enough, but goodness knows how anyone learns Lucky’s speech in Godot or anything by Gertrude Stein. The repetitive card playing of The Gin Game is apparently an incredible challenge, and in the original Broadway production, Hume Cronyn took to writing his cues on the card table itself. Should we be more forgiving of Pacino, who reportedly has to learn pages of new text every day, than of Willis, whose play has been performed before and whose script is probably more stable? (And if this Misery is anything like the movie version, his character doesn’t even do most of the talking.)

Also, both these plays are still in previews (China Doll will be in previews for a while yet as it just delayed its opening), so can temporary assistance be pardoned? We might be more lenient if theatres offered a significant discount during the preview period. Very few do.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deborah Rush, Rupert Everett, Angela Lansbury, Jayne Atkinson and Simon Jones in Blithe Spirit – but what did Lansbury’s hairstyle conceal? Photograph: Robert J Saferstein/AP

We are apparently more merciful toward older actors relying on technology to cover memory lapses. Angela Lansbury wore an earpiece in the recent revival of Blithe Spirit and while some may have looked askance at her hairstyle, which resembles twin cinnamon danishes stuck to her face, there weren’t many criticisms of what that hair concealed. “If we’re going to play important roles at our age, where our names are above the title on the marquee, we’re going to ask for some support if we need it,” Lansbury unashamedly told the New York Times.

At 75, Pacino is not in the first blush of youth. Jones has nearly a decade on him and Tyson is at least 90. There aren’t too many reports of younger actors using earpieces, though some may resort to analogue methods, as when Mario Lopez apparently scribbled lines on to his hat during his A Chorus Line stint or Matthew Broderick used on a seated prompter during the early weeks of The Starry Messenger.

Of course there are alternatives. Surely within the ranks of actors in New York there are excellent, age-appropriate performers who could arrive at the first rehearsal confidently off book. But would we pay to see them? On Broadway big names can be much of the draw and it’s worth wondering if ticket buyers would prefer a word-perfect no-name or a prompted star, though knowing that an actor is prompted does have a way of shearing off some of that celebrity glamour.

Yet even if we still want to see that star, earpiece and all, it’s worth wondering just how much these fed lines enable a performance and how much they inhibit it. Some avant-garde theatre companies, such as the Wooster Group and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, use earpieces deliberately, to connect the actor to the voice or the person he or she is meant to be playing, or to issue directions that only the actors can hear and to which the actors must respond immediately. In the best cases, the actors don’t seem confined by the technology and the results are often thrilling.

On the other hand we have the evidence of Michael Gambon, who gave up stage acting because of the great difficulty he had learning his lines. The anxiety surrounding drying (or what we Americans call “going up”) landed him in the hospital, forcing his withdrawal from Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. He soldiered on for a while, even trying an earpiece. But he felt it constrained his acting. As he told the Sunday Times: “After about an hour I thought, ‘This can’t work. You can’t be in theatre, free on stage shouting and screaming and running around, with someone reading you your lines.’”

Gambon’s declaration should give one pause. How much more ferocious would those card players be without their prompting, how much wackier Madame Arcati? Would Pacino and Willis be delivering better performances without technical assistance? Maybe. Or maybe they wouldn’t be able to deliver those performances at all. After all, which would you rather see, an actor aided by prompting and arguably less engaged in the moment-to-momentness of the live event, or an actor struggling for a line?

There is something both painful and gratifying about watching an actor dry. It reminds us of theatre’s liveness and it can conjure a lot of sympathy for that floundering actor. But it can also be a horrible, cringing thing to behold. I’m not sure that those who saw Jones’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic, which reportedly had many long and uncomfortable pauses, would begrudge him his Gin Game earpiece.

Even actors who don’t rely on earpieces sometimes need a little prompting. Years ago Laurie Metcalf, Willis’s Misery co-star, told a Chicago reporter that she had extra help when she was performing The Miss Firecracker Contest while pregnant with her daughter. “There must have been something about my anxiety and getting ready that would transfer to her,” she said. “On the line before my cue, I’d always feel this little kick.”