Andrew Scott Says He Halted ‘Hamlet’ Performance After Audience Member Opened Laptop

Jake Kanter
·1 min read
34

To be or not to be a troublesome theatergoer? That is the question Andrew Scott tackled head-on during a 2017 production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The Fleabag and Sherlock star has revealed that he halted his Olivier Award-nominated Almeida Theatre performance after he spotted that an audience member had opened his laptop.

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Scott told Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused that he paused in the middle of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy to stare down the distracted ticket holder, despite colleagues urging him to continue.

“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 f***ing be’,” Scott said. “I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way’.”

Scott said the audience member was nudged by the woman next to him and recognized the error of his ways. “It was my agent,” the actor joked.

Scott, who will star alongside Paul Mescal and Claire Foy in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, revealed the poor theater etiquette after Six recently issued a statement telling audience members to stop recording the West End musical.

The stage show, which is running at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, asked ticket holders not to “disrespect other audience members and spoil it” through “photographs, video or audio recordings.”

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