Went to see Tom Murphy's new play at the Royal Court. The first few minutes of it I imagine were rather beautiful, with the fabulous Juliet Stevenson emerging and beginning to speak quietly, while a pale face in the background — her alter ego, Al — was gradually illuminated in the gloom. Anyway, I wouldn't really know, since the moment was destroyed by some latecomers appearing, clump clump clump over the wooden floor of the auditorium, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle past the knees of the people they had to plough over to reach their seats.
It happened the previous week too at Tamburlaine at the Barbican. It was a press night - so you always get double the latecomers to account for those who forgot it was a 7pm start. It was slightly less disruptive because of the dampening Barbican Theatre shagpile, at least.
I know it's a bit mean to banish people entirely from a show they've spent a lot of money on just because they are a bit late, it's just that I find the dawdlers completely distracting - I become totally fixated on them and their clumping to the extent that I lose all concentration.
It's always particularly bad at the beginning of a show — while you're still adjusting between "real life" and the life of whatever you're seeing in the theatre, before you've fully slipped away through Alice's looking glass into that other world. The worst I think, was the moment at the beginning of Wagner's Rheingold - the first few bars of which have got to be in the running for the most magical seconds in the whole of music — devastated by an ill-timed coughing fit when I saw it at the Royal Opera House. Call me a curmudgeon, but it makes me just a tiny bit homicidal.
