The other week, while sitting on the edge of my (vertigo inducing) Upper Circle seat in the Gielgud Theatre, it happened. ‘It’ being the theatregoer’s worst nightmare: attack of the mobile phone.
This was not the first time that it had happened. I am a serial victim of mobile phone ambush. The most memorable single occasion of mobile assault was when a man in the row behind me actually answered his phone and began a conversation during the second act of Les Miserables – I wish I was making this up.
But back to the most recent incident. I had enjoyed almost the whole of the sensational Gavin Creel’s final performance of Hair with minimal audience interruption (in this case I didn’t consider enthusiastic audience appreciation at the end of Mr Creel’s songs an interruption, being among these enthusiastic audience members myself) and was appreciating the unusual lack of bad theatre behaviour; I had been lulled into a false sense of security.
Then in the final moments of the show, as Gavin (and most of the audience) fought back tears, there was the bleep of some popular soul in the Upper Circle receiving a text, snapping the emotional tension. The wave of anger towards this careless theatregoer was tangible – you could almost hear the unspoken collective ‘tut’.
But then something wonderful happened. Gavin Creel’s voice rose over the ring tone, albeit breaking with emotion, and the atmosphere that filled the Gielgud instantly banished any electronic demons. ‘The power of theatre’ is a genuinely awful phrase but for once it was almost justified. Or this might just be the powerful delusion of a girl with a little too much love for both Gavin Creel and Hair.
This is only one battle in an ongoing war and it’s one that I don’t imagine ending any time soon. But in this instance it was, at least in my mind, theatre one, the mobile phone nil.
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