Actor Andrew Scott revealed that while performing as Hamlet, he stopped midway through the play’s famous soliloquy because a member of the audience was using his laptop.

Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was “no way” he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away.

“When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop – not his phone, his laptop – while I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to fucking be’,” said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails.

“I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I stopped for ages.”

A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped.

This is just one of the vast number of incidents reported of people going to films and theaters and behaving badly, such as using phones, talking loudly, taking flash photographs, or even worse like Lauren Boebert, and the like. The ability to carry our communication devices with us everywhere has enabled the rise of this kind of behavior, where people are physically in one location while their minds are in another. One has wonder why people pay good money to go to see something and then decide that they want to do something else. Is it that they simply cannot tear themselves away from their electronic devices, even for just a couple of hours?

People often watch things in their homes, sometimes alone, and so are used to using their phones and/or computers while doing so. I myself find it impossible to do two cognitively demanding things at the same time. I have been convinced by the research that multitasking, the idea that you can absorb two things going on at the same time, is a myth and that what you are always doing is switching attention and missing what is going on in one thing while paying attention to the other. The fact that the audience member did not even know that Scott had stopped his soliloquy until his neighbor told him shows that he was only paying attention to what was on his computer.

I know many people who try to do things like this. Of course when you are watching a film in a theater, it is the people near the offender who are distracted but there is nothing they can do other than tell that person to stop it and risk an ugly confrontation or get up and tell the theater manager to put a stop to it. The movie theater does not stop the film until the person stops doing whatever they were doing. But in live theater, the actor can stop the whole thing, as Scott did.

I think that people in a theater think that they are invisible to the actors on the stage. But I have acted on the stage and also given talks in very large auditoriums and it is not hard to notice what people in the audience are doing. I remember a student telling me that a professor had upbraided her for not paying attention to his lecture. What had shocked her was that he had even noticed what she was doing. She had thought that she was effectively invisible because she was in a large lecture hall with a couple of hundred students, and thus she did not see her behavior as being rude to the professor. I told her that that I could easily see who was paying attention and who was not in my large classes. In my case, I did not confront students who were doing something else because that would only take away from the flow of the class and distract those who were paying attention. I treated the students like adults and if they did not find what I was saying gripping and wanted to do something else, that was their prerogative.

I suspect that the Hamlet patron thought that what he was doing would not be noticed by Scott. But actors are sensitive to the mood of the audience and if they feel that the audience is disengaged, that lowers their energy and passion and their performance is negatively impacted.