Some theatregoers need reminding that what's OK on the sofa at home can be infuriating in an auditorium
for more than a quarter of a century – not to mention a lifelong cinema fan. These hundreds of thousands of hours of viewing have provided me with some fascinating insights into audience behaviour and psychology, ranging from the idiosyncratic to the downright infuriating.
As technology has developed and our homes have morphed into our prime centres of entertainment, we have, dispiritingly, become less skilled at being audience members in a public space, at subsuming our individual needs to the collective good.irksome facets of audience behaviour of late – and they surely will not be the last. Here are my particular bugbears – please don’t try any of these anywhere near me. We all know about this one. For goodness’ sake, turn them off.
Put them away for the duration. End of. Because… Lesley Manville has complained about audience members taking pictures at curtain call Noises from phones are irksome, sure, and it remains a rare evening in the theatre that passes without a single beeping interruption.
However, the light emitted from devices is now even more disruptive, constituting a cruel shattering of the magic spell of a story well told, as Rosamund Pike this week. If you have a sneaky peak at your emails during a show, the sudden illumination from your device will disturb your neighbour.
If you do this every 20 minutes, it will drive everyone in the vicinity quite mad.do not constitute a magic “get out of jail free” card when it comes to technology. Sitting beside a certain type of smartwatch wearer can be akin to sharing space with a lighthouse, such is the incessant stream of light. You have a busy life – I get it.
Yet does that mean we all need to be subjected to the drip-feed of your updates when we’re trying to concentrate? There is a simple way of telling the time without turning your immediate area into Blackpool. It’s called an old-fashioned wristwatch. If it’s an emergency and you’ve got to go, then go you must.
Agreed. Nonetheless, please remember that you are not watching this in your own living room and if you get up during the action you will inevitably disturb a number of people, as Sod’s Law will have it that you will be sitting near the middle of a very long row. If you get up six minutes before the end of the first half and return two minutes later, you are causing an entirely avoidable amount of kerfuffle.
Check the running time of each half and ideally, readjust your bladder/liquid intake accordingly. The light from phones disturbs others in the audience even when the sound is turned off Why do theatres sell crisps – even if they are in a cardboard carton? When – or indeed what – did the crisp ever contribute positively to the viewing experience? There’s a reason why ice cream was the traditional interval treat of choice.
Yet theatre revenues are in urgent need of a boost, which means an ever-increasing picnic of snacks for sale. Even so, come on, please apply discretion/plain common sense and think very carefully before you crunch. A tip: the house lights going down at the start of a play is NOT your cue to start crunching away. This constitutes a worrying new entry in the little black book of annoyances.
The clinking and clunking of cubes of ice in drinks is not the background music that a heartfelt soliloquy requires, yet a bewildering number of ice-berks seem to prioritise their liquid intake over any notion of common courtesy. The rattle of ice against plastic – or even worse, glass – is akin to a slow drip-drip of torture, especially at moments of heightened drama.
Remember that just as with pulling off plasters , trying to drink an iced drink slowly only prolongs the agony. We don’t live in the Sahara, so you’ll survive for an hour if your orange juice doesn’t have chilly cubes in it. Laughing is good. Laughing away as part of a happy audience watching a fine comedy is one of the cultural world’s greatest pleasures.
However. There’s always someone who laughs a little too much, too soon, too long, too knowingly, as if to emphasise that they alone are understanding the piece on a level that mere mortals could not begin to comprehend. For me, nothing is more of a buzz-killer than sitting near such a person.
This sort of behaviour unleashes my inner Grinch and I must restrain myself from asking the perpetrator whether they actually understand what is going on, or whether they are merely trying to convince themselves that they do. This might just be my idiosyncrasy, given that hearing people crack their knuckles has always made my whole body go rigid with revulsion.
Even so, sitting next to someone who systematically cracks all eight crackable joints is a deeply creepy experience and one that no theatregoer requires.
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