Choose Your Fighter: Rosamund Pike or Patti LuPone Yelling at Bad Theatre Etiquette

Theatre etiquette — and the conversation around it — continues to consume us. Whether its texting, talking, or taking photos and videos, the habits have permeated through to movies and live performances in the post-COVID landscape. Actress Rosamund Pike has been thrown into that orbit in recent weeks, after she was distracted by a texting audience member while performing the play Inter Alia on the West End.

After the performance itself and the final bows were over, Pike returned to the stage to address the ordeal, arguing that the distraction broke part of the immersion of the performance. As Pike began: “I just wanted to say for anyone going to the theatre, it’s a huge thing that we’re trying to give you. I am trying to tell you a story, and I’m feeling you, and I hope you’re feeling me too.”

“Somebody was texting in this part,” Pike said as she gestured towards part of the audience. “You know who you are and I’m not going to single you out. Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are, but we do see these, we do feel them. I’ve got you, I feel like I’ve got to hold you all, so when I feel that and see it, it’s hard.”

This continues a trend of celebrities criticizing modern audience ettiquette, whether it be Lesley Manville arguing that it is “insulting” to be filmed during curtain calls, or Andrew Scott calling out an audience member for sending emails on a laptop during a 2017 production of Hamlet. But of course, the pinnacle is arguably from Tony-winning actress Patti LuPone. She very famously stopped a 2009 performance of Gypsy to yell at someone trying to snap a photo, and then grabbed a phone from an audience member’s hands after she saw them texting during a 2015 performance of Shows for Days.

“We work hard on stage to create a world that is being totally destroyed by a few, rude, self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones,” LuPone said in a statement after the latter incident. “They cannot put them down. When a phone goes off or when a LED screen can be seen in the dark it ruins the experience for everyone else – the majority of the audience at that performance and the actors on stage. I am so defeated by this issue that I seriously question whether I want to work on stage anymore. Now I’m putting battle gear on over my costume to marshall the audience as well as perform.”

Stop Doing This!

As if that wasn’t enough, another performance of Inter Alia was disrupted this past weekend. According to reporting from The Guardian, an audience member who was sitting in the front row “failed to notice” that her phone alarm was ringing for at least a minute. Pike reportedly glared at the woman once her phone was silenced, but did not make any public comments about the snafu.

“At first I thought the noise was part of the backing track, it was going on for so long,” an audience member sitting in the second row told the outlet. “But it seemed entirely unfitting with the tone of the scene, about halfway through the play, in which the actors were engaged in quiet conversation… I felt so bad for Rosamund and the rest of the cast, especially after what happened a few weeks ago. She shot the audience member a glare and it seemed to have distracted her from the scene, although she remained entirely professional in her performance.”

“It genuinely was at least a minute,” a member of the front-of-house staff added. “It was an alarm on a phone ringing. It’s hard to know [if it threw the cast off]. I’d imagine it’s more on [Rosamund’s] mind right now, as well, because of the last thing and it being in the front row again. We’ll see if she makes a kind of statement about it. If it’s within the middle of the row, there’s not much we can do because you have to decide whether you’re going to make more of a disruption by trying to signal to them than the actual thing itself. Usually people realise sooner than that, I’m not sure what was going on with this.”

(featured image: 20th Century/Disney+)

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