No, Taking Photos during Curtain Call Is Not “Insulting”

by Chris Peterson

Performers can be annoyed by phones at the theatre. A lot of us are. But calling it “insulting” for people to take a photo or a quick video during the curtain call is where this starts to lose me.

According to The Independent, British actress Lesley Manville said audience members should keep their phones away until after the bows and called it insulting when people “just stick your phone in our face.” She also said people should let theatre “live in their souls for five minutes” instead of rushing to document it.

I get the larger point. Nobody wants to sit near someone filming half a show. Nobody wants a bright screen lighting up the row in the middle of a quiet scene. We all know that is rude. There is certainly no shortage of audience behavior to criticize these days, but this is not one of them.

A curtain call is not the same thing, and many theatre people know that, even if they do not want to admit it. The show is over.

Curtain call is the release valve. It is the applause, the cheers, the standing ovation, the moment where the room lets go and says thank you. It is not someone sneaking a bootleg of a dramatic monologue.

And that is the part of this debate that people in the industry always skip over. Theatre is expensive; for many people, that ticket was a splurge. It was the one show they had been dreaming about seeing for months. So when they take a blurry little curtain call photo, I do not see disrespect. I see someone wanting proof that this thing they were excited about actually happened.

What makes Manville’s comments even more frustrating is that there is no one universal rule here. The Independent points out that some productions, including Six, actively encourage photos and even filming during the curtain call. Oti Mabuse made another good point, saying one photo from a first theatre trip can be something a person holds onto for years. Exactly.

Theatre cannot keep begging people to fall in love with live performance and then act offended when they want to remember the end of it. You do not get to complain about relevance, younger audiences, and social media visibility, then turn around and scold people for documenting the one moment when the performance has ended, and the celebration has started.

If a production wants a no-phone policy through curtain call, that is fine, just make it clear. But this habit of treating audience behavior as a moral failure whenever it doesn’t match an older idea of etiquette is getting old.

Sometimes people are not being disrespectful. Sometimes they are just happy they were there.