Athena: Texting in the theatre is always bad manners
Last week, Rosamund Pike told off an audience member for texting during her play. Bad manners in the theatre has become far too common, writes Athena.
Last week, the issue of audience behaviour in the theatre raised its head again. In a widely reported episode, the actress Rosamund Pike walked back onto the stage after the curtain call of a performance of Inter Alia by Suzie Miller at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End.
She had been playing the part of a judge whose son had been accused of a rape and expressed her distress at seeing someone in the front row of the stalls texting on their phone during the emotional climax of the play. She refused to identify the person responsible, but she optimistically hoped that the text was of great moment. Perhaps, she speculated, the person on their phone was a doctor saving a life? It seems unlikely.
Whatever the truth of the matter, however, the thrust of her reported comments rings true, that the performance — its narrative, message and the underpinning rapport between actors and audience — were punctured by this simple action. Athena completely sympathises and is not surprised that her words were applauded. In the long history of theatre, merely fiddling with a phone might seem a modest distraction. Compare that with the competition between stage and audience in Shakespeare’s Globe, the latter cracking and munching nuts through performances, or the famous excesses of Georgian opera, with rival singers encouraged even to fisticuffs by their supporters in the audience. The use of a mobile phone may be less dramatic, but it is perhaps more insidious.
These amazing devices allow us to carry our worlds with us and that’s a double-edged sword. In positive terms, it places us in easy and immediate connection with our friends. Less attractively, it links us inescapably to our work, responsibilities and problems. Yet, in either respect, by keeping us in touch with so much, they blunt a central purpose of art, which is to offer fresh perspectives on our world.
That’s particularly explicit on the stage, where the theatre demands that the audience suspend its disbelief and enter into a parallel universe with different narratives, realities and perspectives. That suspension of disbelief demanded of the audience by a play can fail for all kinds of reasons, of course, not least because the script is poor or badly acted. Responses might reasonably extend from allowing the mind to wander to leaving the auditorium. The individual who turns on their phone, however, is advertising their disengagement. Shining out in the darkness, the device distracts everyone from what is going on. That’s hard for the actors and it’s hard for the other members of the audience.
Yet the fault of allowing distant concerns to intersect with present concerns through the medium of phones is not a fault restricted to selfish individuals in theatre audiences. We all do something similar when a social-media exchange interrupts a conversation or a meal. Depending on their context, these distractions are not necessarily bad. Small wonder, however, when they occur so commonly in day-to-day life, that some people think them acceptable during a play.
This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
