Imagine, as a soprano of international renown, being forced to break off from a particularly poignant passage of Verdi’s Requiem because an audience member won’t stop filming you on their mobile phone. Then imagine having to explain to this goon why it’s a problem.
That’s where most of us might struggle. It’s curiously hard to explain obscene breaches of etiquette to grown adults. Why do I not want you to blow Hubba Bubba bubbles at a funeral?
Why do I think you should’ve refrained from putting your feet on the headmaster’s desk when we went in for a parents’ meeting? Why should you not have let the door slam in the face of that wheelchair-bound nonagenarian? There are things you hope civilised human beings just know.
Hats off, then, to British soprano Claire Rutter, for having the patience to explain to the troglodyte who interrupted her recent performance of the Requiem at Liverpool Cathedral, that “You’ve got a very bright white light on your camera that’s shining straight into my eyes. When I stand up, I can’t even look at my score.”
You’d think that might do it. And Rutter – who has sung with the English National Opera – was relieved when the man said: “Oh, yes, yes, of course”, and stopped. Only “a few minutes later,” she told this newspaper on Sunday, “he started up again…”, and a few minutes after that “someone from another side of the room, a completely different person, did exactly the same thing”.
Then, at a later performance that same night: “There was a row of camera phones up on a balcony,” the singer lamented, adding: “This is happening more and more often. It’s quite unbelievable. People are not living in the moment and enjoying the experience of the music.”
If it makes Rutter feel any better, the iSquad are not enjoying any experience in their lives. They’re too busy filming it. But it’s their relatives and friends I feel sorry for. Because someone is watching those hours of footage, and you can bet your life it’s not the guy with the iPhone surgically attached to his hand. (Has anyone in the history of wedding videos ever watched theirs?)
So spare a thought for the people being forced to sit through footage of fuming opera singers (demanding “the phone is put away”), of The Birth of Venus, you know, just hanging there on the wall at the Uffizi, of the first half of that Jez Butterworth play in London’s West End – of a thousand things that are fun, glorious and awe-inspiring in real life but defiantly dull in playback.
Like sunsets, the magic of which never translates, I always think that’s payback for trying to capture, own and share this thing you have no business taking the credit for.
How to deal with iCretins in the world of art, music, film and theatre has become a contentious topic over the past decade. Museums were the first to decide that they were going to have to embrace the fact – and the selfies. No one cares about the Mona Lisa if her smile isn’t partially eclipsed by their own gurning head: “Me and Mona! #besties.”
Classical music seems to be heading in the same direction. According to Norman Lebrecht: “A new generation of managers have come in asking themselves, ‘Why are classical audiences declining? What if we do something about it, by making it more friendly for them?’” Although, as he points out, drowning the veggies in ketchup hasn’t worked. Despite the pandering, there is still “absolutely no sign of any increased audience”.
Cinemas are now basically the general public’s front room, and even in theatreland bosses seem to be scared to adopt a hardline approach. This, despite it arguably having suffered the most, what with audience members now openly texting and Googling during performances. That’s when they’re not snapping famous actors such as James Norton naked (in A Little Life at the Harold Pinter theatre last year) or jumping up on stage to charge their phones in fake outlets (over in New York, on Broadway, during a performance of Robert Askins’ Hand to God).
Enough. We are to all extents and purposes talking about children here, and dysfunctional ones at that, so let’s do what super-nannies do when a child refuses to give up their dummy: insist on “dummy-free time”. It’ll be hard at first, but gradually you’ll learn to enjoy an aria, a painting and a theatre scene first-hand, without a camera phone. From there, you can build your way up to a requiem.
