Sea Wall, with Andrew Scott (Old Vic)

And I'm seeing Fun Home on Friday, so if I get tickets for Saturday, I could think of it as my Steve recommends weekend.

I didn't know anything about this so had no expectations.

Andrew Scott's performance is impressive. He is a great raconteur and makes the Old Vic, a space "just the other side of intimacy", feel quite intimate at times as he draws the audience in. Quite a feat given the alienating effect of the lights on all the time.

The play itself though is less convincing. By making it a monologue and then having it delivered the way it is, this basically becomes an exercise in storytelling. And whilst there is definitely a climax, many of the earlier speeches ramble and give a feeling of anecdote rather than woven narrative. At times it was like those long rambling shaggy dog stories Dave Allen or Ronnie Corbett would deliver. It was entertaining but not, at that point, dramatic.

My second problem is the premise. What is the premise? The actor is at times almost engaging with the audience, is he telling (or acting out) a true story? Or is it a fiction within a fiction (unlikely). If the character is giving us a true version of events then it is difficult o understand the light tone which permeates most of the play. I cannot see how anyone involved in it would tell that story that way.

I loved it (last night), I'm very glad I saw it - and like many of you I thought the performance was better than the writing. Andrew Scott is superb, and it's a very difficult trick to preserve the intimacy of the piece in a space the size of the Old Vic; the play itself is engaging enough,but it's also predictable, and there's a point where you can see where it's going to go more than ten minutes before it gets there, which is an issue in a piece that's barely forty minutes long. Stephens's most interesting choice, I thought - and it's the most interesting thing about the entire script - is, well, silence (and if you've seen it you'll know exactly the moment I mean).

While I loved it, though, I am very glad I only paid £15 for it.

I know of 3 people who have gone to 3 separate nights of Seawall and had similar experiences.

Why aren't the Old Vic doing more to control these outbreaks? They need their ushers to a) be briefing audience members on arrival, and b) in the auditorium take action.

I must say Andrew being onstage when the audience arrives does negate a formal theatrical tannoy announcement about phones etc so maybe this piece invites its audience to think they can carry on conversations/calls etc? But really??

Yes, this is a delicate piece, especially with the house lights up, to intervene when people are talking throughout the play (two businessmen just chatting throughout last week) or on phones, etc etc. The ushers should be inside the auditorium and shutting down this behaviour with their presence and with words and ejections if needs be.

You're right in that it's gone beyond now.

We should be building Faraday cages around our theatres from this point onward. The problem is in an audience of a thousand people there will always be a few dickheads who think they know better, or don't care, so leave their phones on vibrate or on the ringer. Telling audiences 20 times to turn their phones off doesn't help, you'll always get someone who'll just ignore the advice. Anyone seen with their phone out by the usher should be ejected and banned from the theatre, maybe after this is seen to happen a few times some minds will be changed...

Policing audience behaviour doesn't appear to be the Old Vic's strength, and that's putting it kindly. I had an absolutely horrendous experience there during a performance of Groundhog Day - a group of four or five (rather drunk) people sitting to my right who obviously considered themselves super-fans of the show, to the point of singing along (bearing in mind that I saw it two weeks after press night, months before a cast recording appeared, so they'd obviously seen it several times already). When a woman in the row in front tried to shush them, one of these charmers emptied his drink over her head.

She complained at the start of the interval, and so did I, and the house manager reseated her, her partner, and I in the company box (the performance was otherwise sold out) - but they didn't throw the perpetrators out. Given that the incident included something that, legally, constitutes common assault, that's inexcusable.

I've been a front-of-house manager, and I understand better than most people that dealing with that kind of patron is not a pleasant part of the job, because I've actually done it. It IS part of the job, though, and giving idiots like this a stern talking-to is pointless. The only way they'll learn is by losing something - that is, by getting thrown out and not being given a refund. Box office terms and conditions invariably allow for this - there is always a clause telling you something along the lines of that admission is at the management's discretion and that they reserve the right to eject patrons who are disruptive.  The fact that the Old Vic couldn't be bothered to do that after an incident in which one patron emptied a drink over another - when independent witnesses confirmed that it had happened - suggests rather strongly that their house manager is either clueless or incompetent or just couldn't give a toss. Theatre is ephemeral. If the experience is spoiled by bad behaviour, that's it - you can't recapture it, and it isn't always possible to go back. The management need to take some responsibility - you are a paying customer too, and it is their job to ensure you experience the performance without disruption from other audience members.

Having said all that, in a piece where there's no interval it becomes a lot more difficult, because throwing someone out under those circumstances is going to cause even more disruption. To be fair, the usher at the door where I went into the auditorium on Thursday made a point of telling every single patron to turn off their phone. I have no idea whether that happened at every door, though; given that ushers on the doors to the stalls would have had to deal with about twice as many people as the ones stationed in the dress circle where I was sitting, I suspect it didn't. Of the four shows I saw in London this week, Sea Wall was the only one where there was not some kind of blanket warning to patrons to turn off phones.

(And the next step is to extend that warning to wearers of smart watches, because light from notifications on watch screens was noticeable at some point during all four performances I saw this week. I would have no argument if the warnings involved duct tape and a taser.)

Now that the preferred ticketing method is an e-ticket could be seen as legitimising the use of a mobile phone.

Difficult to say please switch off your phone whilst asking for your e-ticket.

Maybe they should once scanned say now switch that bloody thing off.

Happy to report a very quiet and well behaved audience at the 5.30 show today.

I'm glad I saw it.

Andrew Scott is just so good.

Another problem this show had that seemed to invite bad behaviour, weirdly, was its performance times.

A 7pm start time for a performance of just 30mins. Smack in the middle of an evening out.

What would office workers potentially do after work/pre-show? Grab a bite to eat, sink a few drinks? The play could be seen as easy, quick entertainment before resuming their evenings out.

This certainly seemed to be the case when we went and two men (husbands of the two quit women with them) talked sotto voice, but still TAKES, all the way trough the play.

They had obviously had a few and thought nothing of narrating what Andrew was recounting.

No one got up to shush them as nobody wanted to disrupt the environment Andrew and the play were trying to create.

Also a 30min play at a prestigious venue with a "celeb" actor to people who maybe don't go to the theatre much would seem very appealing. We're in we're out.

Maybe a newer audience unfamiliar with theatre protocol was attracted by this and subsequently brought with them these disruptions.

It's so sad because you don't want to dissuade new people or create a marshal law, but at the same time you want respect for the actor(s) onstage and those around you to be upheld.

The story above about the woman having a drink thrown over over head and nothing done about it by the OV is disgusting and disgraceful. If the theatres take no action, how are the audiences meant to learn?

It's eternally exhausting, as audience members, having to do the jobs of those paid to work at the theatres and supposedly "usher" a show or manage their ushers.

Something needs to be done.

I've found that chatters and fiddlers with mobile phones come from all age groups, though here, judging by the crowds in the foyer, the Sherlock factor looked like it was bringing a younger demographic in. I didn't notice any mobiles in the performance I went to last weekend, but at Hamlet (in preview) the girl sitting next to me on the front row was in a world of her own and pretty well eating a picnic, including numerous individually-wrapped sweets, a couple of feet from the actors - so close I couldn't 'shush' her - then checking her mobile for train times through the third part and dashing off before the end.

I wonder if little Andy Scott's fan base has something to do with it too? They are younger and probably not used to going to the theatre and behaving in a respectful manner to others. They're more used to watching Netflix on the bus and living their lives through their phones so they're not used to sitting down quietly and concentrating on something in the dark without distractions.

Cattle prods are definitely the way to go.

sf - I'm slightly obsessed with the drink pouring incident you witnessed. That's off the scale.


Yesterday's 5.30 performance - I was up in the Dress Circle - a pretty diverse group, but it was early enough I suppose that none of us was visibly drunk and there were probably more solo theatre-goers than usual, so possibly more hardcore theatre fans.

And to stick up for the young ones (and I'm oooollllldddd) - I think good and bad behaviour spans the generations, so cattle prods and duct tape for all! :-)

Again, thanks for the recommendations here for this, it was your enthusiasm that spurred me to go and I am really glad we did.