Name: The scrunch test.
Age: Two and a bit. First introduced in December 2017.
Appearance: Very welcome.
And what the hell is it? A test on the packaging of food and drink sold in theatres. If it’s too scrunchy, it’s banned.
Who were the spoilsports who introduced this puritanical code? The commendable theatre-lover that announced it was Nimax, which owns six theatres in the West End of London. But the real star of the anti-scrunch movement is the actor Imelda Staunton, who has launched a fusillade against noisy, food-and-drink-obsessed theatregoers in an interview in this week’s Radio Times.
What’s her problem? Being heard above the noise of people in the stalls gorging, basically. “Why are you selling crisps!!!!?,” she asks theatre companies with a suitably rhetorical flourish. “I just do not get it. None of us can be without food for five minutes. And the drinks! Plastic glasses falling on the floor when there’s a quiet moment.”
I seem to recollect Staunton has been banging on about this for a while. You are clearly an avid reader of the Stage. She made similar comments in 2016, again wondering why theatregoers were incapable of getting to the interval without consuming a trayful of burgers and a couple of bottles of warm white wine. And when she appeared in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Harold Pinter theatre in 2017, the theatre asked patrons not to eat during the performance.
Will her crusade succeed? Almost certainly not. Theatregoers now insist on talking, eating and using their mobile phones as if they were binge-watching Netflix in their living room. Any notion of the sanctity of live performance has been lost.
But weren’t the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe raucous and partial to pork pies, oysters and the odd flagon of mead? An interesting historical point. There is indeed archaeological evidence that Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers ate and drank copiously, but that was before plastic packaging. Jumbo-sized packets of Doritos would have driven Shakespeare crackers.
Not to be confused with: The equally annoying people who eat in cinemas and have to be drowned out by ear-splitting, headache-inducing sound levels. And people with coughs at classical concerts who think they are doing everyone else a favour by noisily unwrapping cough sweets.
Do say: “Unquiet meals make ill digestions.”
Don’t say: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
