To stop or not to stop: Scott halts Hamlet over emailing spectator
ANDREW SCOTT has revealed that a turn as Hamlet was interrupted by a spectator taking out his laptop to answer emails during the “To be or not to be” speech.
While performing Shakespeare’s longest play, the Irish actor noticed a member of the audience take out his computer, forcing him to pause his performance.
The actor said: “When I was playing Hamlet … a guy took out his laptop, not his phone, his laptop, and thought ‘I’ll just answer a couple of emails’.
“And I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to be’ and I was like pausing, [the stage team] were like ‘get on with it’, and I was like, ‘there’s no way’.”
Speaking on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, he added: “He didn’t realise, I stopped for ages.”
Scott explained that the audience member was eventually alerted to the awkwardness of the situation by the person sitting next to him and offered an apology, but the actor believes the man on his laptop thought himself innocent of any rudeness, explaining: “He had no doubts.”
The incident took place when Scott, 47, was playing Hamlet at the Almeida Theatre in London during a 2017 run.
His experience of being interrupted on stage is not unique, and numerous stars have had to endure irritations, from mobile phones going off to rowdy audience members being ejected.
In 2009 Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig were starring in the play A Steady Rain on Broadway when they were both interrupted on separate occasions by a mobile phone ringing in the theatre, with Jackman asking his particular nuisance spectator: “Do you want to get that?”
In 2013, James Mcavoy was playing Macbeth at London’s Trafalgar Studios, and stopped mid-performance to berate a member of the audience who had begun filming him.
In 2016, actor Laurence Fox suffered his own bout of “stage rage” when he stopped a performance of The Patriotic Traitor and said “I won’t bother telling you the story because this ---- in the front row has ruined it for everybody”, before storming off stage.
He later explained that a spectator in the front row had been continually talking throughout the show.
In 2023, there were numerous complaints about the behaviour of audiences in the West End, particularly for musicals.
A fight broke out during the Meat Loaf musical Bat Out of Hell at London’s Peacock Theatre, and police in riot vans were called to Manchester’s Palace Theatre after a performance of The Bodyguard was brought to an end by brawling and “disgusting” audience behaviour.
The Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG), the largest theatre operator in the country, took steps to temper advertising campaigns that promote drinking and rowdy behaviour among theatregoers.
There are wider fears about the decline in theatre etiquette, and experts have warned that the rise of the standing ovation presents a problem.
Some observers have become concerned that exuberant ovations borrowed from America may dilute the significance of what was once a rare honour granted by reserved British audiences.
William Hanson, etiquette coach and director of the protocol consultancy The English Manner, said: “Standing ovations are a bit like swearing – the more you do it, the less weight it carries.
“Today, people will stand up for anything. Even mediocre to poor performances get at least some of the audience rising to their feet in a mid-atlantic frenzy.”
‘A guy took out his laptop. [the stage team] were like “get on with it”. I was like, “there’s no way”’