Is audience behaviour getting worse? Or is it just that new technology is becoming more obtrusive? Before anyone accuses me of being a Grumpy Old Man, I should say that I can scarcely remember a time when London offered such a wide range of high-quality shows: Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Seafarer, The Alchemist, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Waiting for Godot and Cabaret are all, in different ways, superb. At the same time, audiences seem to be getting less considerate.

We’ve all heard the stories of Richard Griffiths interrupting performances of The History Boys in London and New York because of ringing mobile phones. Some old pros argue that Griffiths should have ploughed on. I’m with Griffiths. When he stopped the show on Broadway, he told a family of four, each of whose mobiles had gone off in the space of five minutes: “You’ve shown the most incredible disrespect to a thousand people in this room.” I gather he was wildly applauded.

I had my own Richard Griffiths moment in the West End during the first night of Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre where my attention was distracted for the whole of the first half by the luminous glare of a Blackberry being frantically used by a gent about six seats in. Others were as angry as myself and, in the interval, I beetled off in search of the house manager to register a complaint - something on which she promised to act.

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