When I was a kid, my parents used to take me once or twice a year to the theatre, to see a musical or a play. And it always was something special: we would dress up to the eyeballs and then mingle and sit among other well-dressed and -behaved individuals. During the performance there would be silence in the audience and no disruption from mobile phones (the fact that mobile phones did not exist then may have something to do with that). During the intervals there would be hushed conversation only and any raised voice would attract disapproving stares from the rest of the audience.
How times have changed! Not only that theatre goers don’t dress up anymore (not all of them anyway), but nowadays people film the performance on their mobile phones, hold conversations (‘Sorry, can’t talk, am at the theatre’), unwrap noisily and eat sweets or even hold picknicks (‘please pass me the chicken nuggets, dear’), tweet and text during the show, or check the football scores or – even worse – watch the final minutes of that crucial game or the penalty shootout live.
Quite rightly fellow members of the audience and actors are annoyed by this sort of behaviour and some will not hesitate of shaming offenders on the spot. Dame Helen Mirren apparently even once stepped in the middle of a performance outside the theatre she was performing in to scold a noisy group of street drummers.
Here just a few basic rules from the New York School of Etiquette (and the whole list can be found here):
- Dress for the occasion
- Be on time
- Do not eat crunchy snacks during a live performance
- Do not talk during the performance
- Do stay awake
- Turn off your mobile phone
- Don’t sing along (unless it’s Panto obviously)
However, should you feel these requests are quite unreasonable, then I suggest you stay at home, change into something comfortable, get the snacks out, put your feet up and put on a DVD box-set.
The grumpy older man 