Poor old Madonna. What must it be like to be trapped perpetually in the public spotlight?
Last week she was involved in yet another controversy, when she was roundly castigated by fellow theatregoers in New York for continually texting on her mobile phone throughout a performance of the off-Broadway musical Hamilton. The show, which has proved an unexpected hit, seemed to hold few attractions for the 56-year-old pop diva, who barely looked up from her phone for much of the second act, much to the annoyance of those seated around her.
If I sound a little anxious about her behaviour it’s because I’m opening in a play myself in London’s West End next week, and like most seasoned stage actors, have already experienced the decline in the standard of audience manners at live performances.
The fact is, a modern theatre is already a pretty noisy place, even before audience members decide to call their friends in the middle of the show. Invariably situated in a busy part of town, actors have to cope with a nightly diet of wailing police sirens, cascades of glass bottles being tipped into recycling bins, and in one theatre of my acquaintance, an automated hand dryer in the toilets, which whirrs away for several minutes each time it’s activated.
During the recent West End run of Peter Morgan’s hit play The Audience, detailing Queen Elizabeth II’s weekly meetings with her various prime ministers during her long reign, the actress Dame Helen Mirren, playing the eponymous role, even had to briefly leave the stage to remonstrate with a party of passing drummers and cymbal clangers in the street outside.
Even now that she’s performing the same role to great acclaim on Broadway, she’s wryly reported this week that the show has to compete each evening with the collected works of Abba, due to the musical Mamma Mia! thumping away merrily in the adjoining building. One can only hope the real queen never had to suffer such indignities.
But in addition, punters increasingly like to bring their outside world into the play along with them. Sweet wrappers, crisps, fizzy drinks, and even in one case I recall spying from the stage, a young couple tucking into what seemed to be a platter of supermarket sandwiches.
The problem is all the greater among the under 25s, a generation for whom life before the advent of internet connectivity seems as aged and lumpen as images on stained-glass windows. Any situation in which they’re prevented from calling their friends and loved ones for more than few minutes at a time can be a psychological torture for those unused to such old-fashioned courtesies.
The more intractable issue is that of punters’ mobile phones ringing mid-performance. And even if you arrange for a public address announcement before curtain up asking the audience to turn them off, the problem is invariably merely shunted on to the second half, when all those who checked their messages at the interval forget to switch them back off again.
Thankfully in Madonna’s case nothing came of her transgression, other than a tart instruction from the play’s author and leading man Lin-Manuel Miranda that he didn’t want the star backstage after curtain down.
If so, she may have had a lucky escape. In recent years there have been several instances in London’s theatreland of actors stopping the show and shaming a disruptive audience member into leaving the venue. There was even a case of an actor leaping offstage mid-scene to wrestle the offending gizmo from the miscreant’s hand. You don’t get that sort of humiliation at your local multiplex.
The play in which I’m appearing over the next three months will hopefully be relatively free of such shenanigans. But if you are thinking of coming to see it Madonna, could I ask you one thing before you take your seat. Unwrap your toffees, switch off your phone – and on no account use the hand dryer in the toilets during the interval. You could get into a lot of trouble.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins