"Please turn your phones off." We've all heard this plaintive appeal from theatre staff, and we’ve all ignored it. If you’ve been to the theatre at all in the last few years, you will definitely have seen the bright glow of someone checking their phone in the dark auditorium – maybe that bright glow was even coming from your own phone – as the actors try to soldier on regardless a few metres away. Adrian Dunbar recently complained that audiences no longer understand the fourth wall – the imaginary barrier that separates the actors on stage from the audience.
Two people who have intimate knowledge of this appalling behaviour are actor Norma Sheahan and Bord Gáis Energy Theatre General Manager Stephen Faloon. They both spoke to Sarah and Cormac on Drivetime and Norma, who has experienced many incidents of people checking their phones during a performance is remarkably understanding about it, but Stephen not so much. Norma seems to have reached the acceptance stage:
"That’s just the way things are now. Plays used to be 3 hours, now people’s attention span is 17 seconds. You have to forgive them."
Do you though? Stephen would beg to disagree – and woe betide anyone who whips their phone out during a show at his theatre:
"During the show we have ushers that are policing and whenever they see a light from a phone, they will go down and shine a torch at the customer and say, 'Please turn the phone off.’ And I think it’s the right thing to do."
Is it a case of two wrongs making a right, though? And then what if there’s a person in the audience with medical issues, what does the cast or the theatre staff do about that? Norma told Sarah and Cormac what she does, because it happened to her:
"You just never know what issues people have. There was someone with a breathing kind of an oxygen tank in the front row there for a two-hour show I was doing on my own once. I just had to pretend it wasn’t there, but it was really, really loud, like, for the whole show."
Norma – forgiving and accepting as she is – naturally takes the view from the stage:
"As an actor, if you let it get to you, it’ll affect your performance and you’ll end up getting agitated, you’ll do something wrong, you’ll get more agitated, you’ll forget your lines."
Fair. But what about the silent majority of the audience? Stephen tends to see things from their point of view:
"As an audience member, when I’m sitting in that lovely auditorium with all those people around me, having this wonderful shared magical experience and then I see the light of a phone near me, it takes me out of that moment straight away and I no longer enjoy the brilliant performances on stage, I am actually looking at a phone. And I find that very annoying and I think a lot of our audience members find it annoying too."
Sarah puts the old babysitter conundrum to Stephen – what if the babysitter is texting you? Well, what did babysitters do before there were smart phones, one could ask. But Stephen is reliably straightforward about it:
"Leave the room because honestly, when you actually open it up, it’s ruining it for maybe hundreds of people around you that can see it. You think that you’re doing it discretely, but it can never be discrete in a very dark room."
Some guy texts in to say that actors are being too precious and phones are part of life now and we pay good money to go to the theatre, yada, yada. It’s not a very enlightened comment really, because nobody pays good money to see and hear someone else’s phone during a live performance, do they? Sarah wonders if maybe theatres should consider the approach of some music venues and insist on phones being stored outside the auditorium during the performance? Stephen says they haven’t tried it yet at his venue, but it’s certainly something they wouldn’t rule out. Watch this space.
You can hear Norma and Stephen’s full conversation with Sarah and Cormac by clicking above.