Many years ago, an Italian friend of mine uttered a wise sentence that I have often had cause to reflect upon. “Life is for living, not for photographing,” said a disappointed Sabina (it sounds even snappier in Italian) after having her experience of a live gig ruined by the constant taking of photos on phones by fellow audience members. This is a statement, I suspect, with which Lesley Manville would strongly concur.
Manville, who is currently being as magisterial as ever in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, lamented in a recent interview with Radio 4’s Front Row the number of spectators who “stick up” their phones “in our faces” for pictures as soon as a performance ends and actors come out to take their bows. “Why can’t they let it live in their souls for five minutes?” Manville asked wistfully, noting that this practice, which is already widespread on Broadway, is becoming increasingly prevalent in this country too.
This is, of course, the old philosophical question about trees falling unwatched in a forest respun for the digital age: if you don’t take a picture at the end of a play, will you – or your social media followers – believe you were ever really there? Yet, let’s start by getting the issue in perspective: phones once a play has ended are infinitely preferable to phones during a performance (do not get me started; it’s not only noise but light that causes infinite distractions) – but phones once the players have left the stage is undoubtedly best of all.
It’s not just the sound of phones but also the light that is distracting (Photo: Grant Buchanan/Dave Benett/Getty for Kinky Boots the Musical)At the end of a play, a good play at least, there are a precious few seconds when time seems to hang in the air in suspended animation, as it struggles to transition from Theatre Special Time back to boring old GMT. Still under the magic spell of live performance, we gently return to ourselves as we start to process what we have just watched and prepare to demonstrate our appreciation to the actors. All of us, we and them, are still sharing the same air, the collective suspension of disbelief still seems possible – so to have that shattered by a too-soon intrusion of the hullaballoo of the real world is cruel.
For the brandishing of phones as cameras doesn’t only block sightlines, putting literal obstacles between punters and actors. The reactivation of our mobile devices after a period of dormancy also means lights and sounds, buzzings and notifications and all the urgency of life is suddenly back upon us, whether it is our own phone or not. Romantic scheming in 18th-century France, say, is banished in an instant in favour of a slew of updates about delays on the tube and other such quotidian realities.
If I as a spectator object to having these last couple of precious minutes ruined, imagine how much more thankless it must be for the performers who have worked so hard to entrance us, to watch the bubble be so swiftly burst. Why can we instead not look lingeringly and photograph the spectacle in our mind’s eye, for storage in the most special place possible? If we truly feel we have to provide concrete proof of our attendance, we can always take a selfie outside the theatre afterwards.
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