Dear Actors: Stop Whining About Audience Members Looking At Their Phones

Everybody in performance needs to toughen up and remember that “hushed reverence at public performances, from classical music to theatre, is a relatively recent invention, to keep the riff-raff out; it sounds as if attending plays in Shakespeare’s day, all tobacco and ale and raucous banter, was more closing time on a bank holiday than church service. It kept the playwrights and the actors on their toes, because they were forced to earn the audience’s attention, rather than just expect it.”