Going to an art gallery or to a gig? Prepare to meet the iMorons

Bands and actors are calling time on people who can only experience a performance while filming it or sending emails. Too right, smartphones are rotting our cultural fabric, says Mark Beaumont

Phone-a Lisa: individuals refusing to experience the famous artwork unless it’s through their screens (Alamy )

You can understand the thought process. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” mused Andrew Scott from the stage, facing down literature’s most incisive existential quandary. “B2B?” thinks the bloke in row J, “oh bugger, I forgot to email Len from distribution”, as he whips out his MacBook and, mid-soliloquy, sets about tidying up some light admin.

Such was the scene, according to Sherlock and Fleabag actor Scott, when he stopped a performance of Hamlet at Islington’s Almeida Theatre in 2017 because someone was working on their laptop at the play’s most pin-drop moment. “I was pausing and [the stage crew] were like, ‘get on with it’,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast last week. “I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I stopped for ages.”

Scott isn’t the only screen-dazzled thesp who has railed against technology destroying the magic of theatre. During another performance of Hamlet in 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch lashed out at audience members filming on their phones, describing it as “mortifying” that the dredging of his very soul was being reduced to a tawdry #Cumberbard hashtag. Playing Macbeth in 2013, James McAvoy made it clear he’d bring Great Birnam Wood down on the Dunsinass of whoever was filming him on their mobile. “The theatre is very much an engaged and a collective experience,” Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar told The Times this week. “Sometimes it’s people who haven’t been to the theatre before who just don’t get it. They don’t know about the fourth wall.”