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Rosamund Pike probably lost a fan last weekend, while simultaneously gaining many more. The secret texter she called out without identifying presumably wasn’t too thrilled to be unnamed but shamed at the end of Pike’s play Inter Alia, but for everybody who has ever had a bad trip to the theatre, it was a good point, well-made and about time, too.
After the final curtain, Pike returned to the stage to explain: “I am trying to tell you a story, and I’m feeling you, and I hope you’re feeling me too ... 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.”
An attender told the BBC, “The audience was suitably appalled, although next to us a gentleman had an Apple Watch going off constantly and the couple behind me talked through the whole show.”
Are these people being forced at gunpoint to go to the theatre? It’s a mystery why they’re there when they so clearly don’t want to be, particularly when you consider how expensive it is. It’s like spoiling yourself with a special meal at a super fancy restaurant, and then, when the food arrives, chucking it on the floor.
I would have found it difficult to believe that human beings behave like this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. When Covid restrictions lifted, I took my then-six-year-old to a matinee of & Juliet, a feminist reboot of Romeo and Juliet with music by songwriter Max Martin AKA the producer and songwriter behind many Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys bangers. From the moment the curtain rose it was apparent that this was going to be emotional, and it was clear how much it meant to the performers to be treading the boards again after months of London’s glittering West End being dark.
Unfortunately, minutes later, a group of women holding two glasses of prosecco each burst through the doors and sat directly behind us. They were talking as they arrived, and continued their conversation, laughing and shrieking at full volume, as if the show was a mirage visible to everyone in the room but them. Throughout the performance, they provided a constant, distracting running commentary of every imaginable subject, apart from the musical they were not watching.
We were near the front, and in the second half, an actor was a few feet from us, giving a haunting, a cappella rendition of Spears’s I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman his absolute all. You could have heard a pin drop, if the Spice Girls tribute act behind us had kept quiet for a single second. They were so loud, so rude, so insulting to the cast and everybody else spending a fortune to nervily sit in a crowd for the first time since lockdown that I snapped. Although “snapped” makes it sound much more impressive than it was, because obviously what I did was meekly and apologetically beg them to be quiet please, thank you, sorry. At the same time I wondered if this was a Sixth Sense Bruce Willis-type situation, where only I could see and hear them, because no one in the seats around us said anything to back me up, or help, not even when it got nasty, which – shocker – it immediately did. I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen. They would see the error of their ways, be mortified, vow to change, we’d swap numbers and become lifelong best buddies? You’ll be stunned to hear that the opposite occurred. At one point I wondered if this post-coronavirus treat I’d taken my son out for was going to end with him watching me get beaten up by five hen-night huns outside the theatre.
A friend I wailed to afterwards sympathised, and told me that when she had been in a similar situation, the people she’d asked to shush had spent the rest of the evening throwing popcorn in her hair. I was comforted by not being alone, but this should not be a relatable experience. We shouldn’t have to only go to plays starring Pike, or take our chances. So please, if you’re having ambivalent feelings about going to the theatre, take the advice Boris Johnson preached without practising back in March 2020: you must stay at home.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
