An instance of jaw-dropping self-centredness at the theatre has hit the news this week with Andrew Scott recounting how, during his Almeida Hamlet in 2017, an audience member took out a laptop half way through ‘To be or not to be’. The soul of self-restraint, the Irishman built in an agonising pause (“I stopped for ages”) until the miscreant’s neighbour alerted them to the silent reproof and the offending item was closed.
Actors have found themselves having to reprove spectators with increasing frequency, it feels.
You don’t need to look far to alight on comparable moments when technology has threatened to upstage the main event, though a laptop sounds like a first. In 2013, James McAvoy stopped a performance of Macbeth to demand an audience-member desist from filming him. And in 2018, Orlando Bloom stopped a performance of Killer Joe at the Trafalgar theatre with two commands to a woman for using an iPad. The irate “I need you to put the iPad away now!” was apparently followed by “Put that f—ing iPad away now, and I will wait”. In her defence, a fellow audience-member later Tweeted that she had simply been using it as a DIY fan to help keep cool, something Apple rarely markets as a plus.
Mind you, at least with tech there’s no odour. The nadir of theatregoing is surely the smell, and scrunch, of gobbled food, and the producer Richard Jordan relived a moment of emetic horror in the Stage in 2016 when he described attending a West End Doctor Faustus starring Game of Thrones’ heartthrob Kit Harington. “After the interval,” he revealed, “a couple saw nothing wrong in producing … a box of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and a large side of fries.”
James Parker is a UK-based entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to the West End, he offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
