There’s nothing more vuLGar than guzzling food in public

As more and more people eat on the street, trains and even at the theatre, it’s giving GYLES BRANDRETH indigestion . . . by Gyles Brandreth

LAST week, for a new year treat, my wife took me to see the four great Shakespeare history plays at the Barbican in London. The plays were wonderful, but the experience was all but ruined by the quaffing, sluicing, coughing, munching and crunching going on all around me.

These days, it seems that people don’t go to the theatre to watch a play: they go to eat, drink and be merry.

Just as King Richard II, played by a softly spoken David Tennant, was preparing to meet his end, in the stalls the teenage girl sitting next to me was opening her second bag of chocolate-coated nuts, while her mum was glugging noisily on her second beaker of red wine.

Yes, I noticed during the interval that the mum had brought two large reds back with her. Clearly, she didn’t want to see noble King Richard die without having something on hand to soften the blow and steady her nerves.

In the next play, even as Sir Antony Sher as Sir John Falstaff strutted his impressive stuff upon the stage, around me in row Q the audience was putting up some lively competition.

Behind me, a lady was rifling through her handbag for her sweets. (She did this continuously for the entire three-hour performance. Only during the interval did she stop. Once the lights went down, she immediately started again.)

In front, a young man was squelching his way through a very moist egg sandwich while, with a full mouth and in a loud whisper, explaining to his girlfriend that the actor playing Falstaff was married to the director of the play.

To my left, the ladies who had opted for white wine were sucking it up through straws while rattling t he i ce cubes merrily in their plastic glasses.

Much of Shakespeare’s finest invective features in his history plays. When it comes to verbal abuse, the Bard was the master. I’d like to have seen some of it directed at t he members of t he audience.

What do these people think they are doing? Yes, it’s January, so a bit of coughing is only to be expected in a public place — and, of course, I’d understand someone quietly sucking on a lozenge or taking surreptitious sips of water.

BUT at the Barbican last week, I have to tell you the glugging never stopped. It seemed that every third person in the theatre had a huge bottle of water to hand, and most of them had it permanently fixed to their mouths. Some of the bottles come equipped with teats, so you have to listen to lips smacking before the gulping and the gurgling starts.

Of course, there’s nothing new in food and drink being available in theatres. In the Fifties, when I was a boy, I went to matinees in the West End with my mother, and tea in a china pot on a tin tray was served to us in our seats in the interval. Act Two was always played to the tinkle of rattling teacups.

In Shakespeare’s day, fresh fruit, nuts and ale were sold to the groundlings standing in the pit.

I remember the veteran comedian Tommy Trinder telling me his abiding memory of playing pantomime in the Thirties was ‘ the smell of oranges and wee-wee coming up from the stalls’.

Audiences have always been something of a challenge. While taking his curtain call, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Donald Wolfit would mutter under his breath: ‘Coughing bastards’.

But I sense that it is worse now that it has ever been.

As an occasional performer myself, I’ve seen it from the stage. I have been in shows where members of the audience sitting in the front row think nothing of putting their drinks and their feet on the edge of the stage as though it’s the table in their lounge.

Indeed, that is the root of the problem. People now treat the theatre as though they were at home watching the telly.

We don’t eat at a dining table any more: we eat and drink in front of the box. We chat, too. And text. And tweet. And check our emails. And order takeaways.

And what we do at home, we feel we should be able to do just about anywhere. There are no boundaries anymore. This is the age of entitlement. Everyone thinks they can do whatever they like, wherever and whenever they please.

And we know, from the obesity epidemic sweeping the nation, that the thing we like doing best is eating and drinking.

At my local cinema there are divans to lie on and you can buy wine by the bottle and popcorn in cartons the size of umbrella stands.

People don’t sit silently in the dark watching the movie any more. They lie back on their sofas, gobbling and guzzling from start to finish, like debauched Romans in a remake of Carry On Cleo.

We don’t need the Department of Health to tell us that the country is collapsing under its own weight. We have the evidence of our own eyes. And it’s not a pretty sight.

The other day, I saw a young mum breastfeeding her son in a public place. No harm in that, of course, but it seemed a bit unusual because he was a toddler (at least three years old, I’d say) and he was standing up at her side to feed while holding a half-eaten piece of chocolate in each of his chubby little hands.

And his mum, I noticed, had a large cappuccino in a paper cup in one hand and a ham-and- cheese croissant in the other.

WHEN I was a boy, 60 years ago, my father inculcated in me what you might call street etiquette. Rightly or wrongly, in those days a lady would never be seen smoking in the street and a gentleman would always walk on the side closest to the kerb. If a hearse passed by, you always stopped and raised your hat to show respect.

And, regardless of age or gender, you’d never, ever even dream of eating or drinking in the street.

Nowadays, we are all fatter than we were (me included) because the eating and drinking never stops.

And, of course, the streets themselves are strewn with litter because the pavements are awash with porking pedestrians filling their faces with food and fluid and then just dropping the containers and their left-overs on the ground when they’re done with them.

In offices across the country, it’s now normal to shovel down lunch while still sitting at your desk — dropping sandwich crumbs into the crevices of your keyboard and spilling left- overs on important documents.

Worse still, walk around any city centre and you’ll see smartly dressed young men and women devouring £4 Pret a Manger sarnies or gulping take-away coffees as they rush along, seemingly too hungry to wait to get back to their work stations before they greedily devour their lunch.

Living in London, I travel on the Underground most days and every day in every carriage I see someone tucking into this or that. Sometimes it’s simply a breakfast bar or a bag of crisps. That’s unattractive enough; but more usually it’s a burger or a Pot Noodle, and the vile smell overpowers the entire carriage.

On the Underground last week, coming back from the Barbican, I came across an entire family sharing a full Indian meal, complete with naan bread and poppadoms. I counted 14 cartons of food between them. When they got off the Tube, they blithely left all the stinking packaging behind them.

I had just been to the theatre and I wanted to give them a piece of my mind: ‘Thou stuffed cloak-bags of guts, thou bolting- hutches of beastliness, thou knotty- pated fools, thou whore son obscene greasy tallow-catches!’

That’s what I wanted to shout after them. But I didn’t.