We Are No Longer Present

: An Evening at the Theatre in the Age of Permanent Distraction

There was a time when going to the theatre involved a rather radical idea: you went, you sat down, and you watched the thing.

Not half of it.

Not while simultaneously conducting a parallel existence in your pocket-sized digital universe.

The whole thing.

From beginning to end.

Without outsourcing your attention to 47 different notifications about parking, dinner, or someone you vaguely knew in 2013 posting a photo of their sourdough.

Just you, the stage, and the uncomfortable possibility that you might have to think uninterrupted thoughts for more than eight seconds.

But apparently that era is now considered quaint.

In the latest entry in the long-running series How We Have Decided to Stop Paying Attention to Anything Ever Again, audience members at a London production of Inter Alia starring Rosamund Pike were reportedly texting during the performance.

Texting. During theatre. In London. A city that once managed an empire without everyone even once checking Insagram.

The incident prompted Ms Pike to do something increasingly rare in modern public life: she addressed reality directly.

After the final curtain, she reportedly walked on stage to rebuke the audience.

A moment which, in earlier centuries, would have been called “basic human sanity,” but now registers as borderline experimental theatre in its own right.

It’s tempting to treat this as a simple manners issue.

It’s rude to text while sitting in the third row of a London theatre where the actress can see your emojis as she’s trying to recite a monologue about sexual violence.

And that would be true.

But it would also be too comforting. Because manners suggest intent.

But what we are dealing with now is something more passive, and more automatic.

The real problem is not so much a decline in etiquette so much as the civilisation-wide condition of partial presence. No one is ever fully anywhere anymore.