Eating and drinking in theatres should be banned, Imelda Staunton has said, as she called on people to give the performance their full attention.
In an interview with the Radio Times, the actor who starred in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Vera Drake also said she felt people were overburdened with choice because there were now too many television channels.
“I don’t know why people can’t engage in just one thing. I don’t understand this obsession with having to eat or drink something at every moment of the day,” she said.
The multi-award-winning actor said she even goes so far as to avoid eating when watching television at home. “I don’t do TV dinners. There might, at one point in the evening, be a very small, very naughty bowl of ice cream. But that’s not noisy.”
Staunton was scathing about the quality of television. “I don’t want American television here. It’s channel after channel after channel, and that dilutes things. It’s like going to a big supermarket and being overwhelmed by the choice of biscuits.”
She said people would talk to each other about big programmes, such as Downton Abbey and Sherlock. “But now, that unifying thing of people all talking about one piece of television is disappearing.”
Staunton stepped into a debate over what constitutes appropriate behaviour for audiences at live performances. In an article in the Stage in July, the theatre producer Richard Jordan said he had recently been sat among “possibly the worst West End audience” he had ever encountered.
Jordan said some theatregoers at a production of Doctor Faustus had spent the whole performance eating loudly. “It was like listening to eating in Dolby Stereo, and sadly at the expense of being able to properly hear the lines being spoken on stage,” he wrote. Others had engaged in “some of the most blatant use of mobile phones to record video and take pictures I have witnessed”.
But the star of that production, Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington, insisted he had seen little wrong with the audience’s behaviour and said cracking down on young fans could kill the theatre.
“I am afraid that, if the theatre is going to die of anything, it will be from exactly this type of stereotyping and prejudice aimed towards a new and younger generation of theatregoers,” Harington said. “I have been a theatregoer since childhood and I didn’t feel that our audiences were disrespectful in the slightest. In the whole run of 10 weeks, I can count one time that a phone went off in the audience.”
