Yvette Huddleston: Why theatre audiences must learn to button it

Having delivered his salvo in the final minutes of the play, Fox then left the stage and did not return for the curtain call. So, was he being a petulant luvvie or did he have a valid point?

Fox later apologised for his outburst, but he had plenty of support in his actions, not least from a number of equally enraged audience members and his co-star Tom Conti who commented in the Guardian that unwanted audience participation in live theatre was on the increase. “I think people these days forget that theatre is live, and performed by living creatures, because they watch everything on a screen now... it’s a very odd society that we live in.” I couldn’t agree more.

It seems to me that there are two things going on here – firstly there is the potentially distancing effect of experiencing too much of life, and art, either directly via the medium of a screen or filtered through it. It means that our relationship with art is at one remove.

So you get the strange phenomenon of people in an art gallery taking photographs of the artworks on their smartphones rather than relating to them, spending time with them, reflecting on them face to face in real life and in the moment. Similarly at music festivals and concerts, it’s not uncommon to see a sea of smartphones being held up in the air as audience members record the concert rather than experience it.

The other related thing that the Fox incident highlighted was the way in which the modern-day practice of instantly sharing opinions on anything and everything on social media has influenced real-life interactions.

Of course, everyone is entitled to voice their opinions – open, honest debate is a mark of a democratic society after all – and certainly a play such as The Patriotic Traitor would throw up some interesting talking points, but surely discussion of them could wait at least until after the end of the performance.

It is also about respect. Those people up on stage are at work – as Kevin Spacey so clearly expressed a few years ago when during a production of Richard III he directly addressed a theatregoer whose ringing phone was disrupting the action, remarking drily: “Tell them we’re busy.”