On cinema- and theatre-going etiquette!

Years ago, more years than I really care to remember, Phil and I went for a short holiday in Nice. Well worth a visit, by the way! While we were there we went to the cinema. A new film with Audrey Tatou had just come out, “Un long dimanche de fiancailles”, and we decided to go and see it. The film was good but the cinema was better.

The seats were red plush, reclining, super-comfortable, so much so that we thought we might like to move in there and abandon our hotel room. Each seat had a built-in cup- or glass-holder. What a surprise! We had never seen anything like that in the UK.

When the Cornerhouse Cinema in Manchester, a wonderful little cinema for foreign and arthouse films which I visited often with A-Level students for film study days, closed all it’s business moved to spanking new premises not too far away, still in the same bit of Central Manchester. Home, as it is called, has screening rooms of varying sizes, a theatre and lecture hall, bars and restaurants. All in all, a thoroughly nice venue for an evening out at the pictures. And the cinema seats, if not as plush and fine as in the one in Nice, all have drinks holders.

Why do people feel the need to take drinks into the cinema, or indeed the theatre? And not just drinks. I find it hard to understand. There has long been a sort of tradition of taking a bag of sweets with you -perhaps in case you had a coughing fit - especially if you were going to a pantomime. I distinctly remember going to a pantomime with a friend to celebrate her birthday when we were in primary school. Her parents gave us money to spend on sweets. We spent the lot on Uncle Joe’s mint ball. By the end of the evening the roof of our mouths was raw. It was years before I could face Uncle Joe’s mint balls again. But the consumption of sweets was fairly limited as was the variety of stuff on sale in the foyer. Mostly consumption was limited to the ice creams sold by the usherettes with their trays of goodies at the interval. That was why there was a B movie and the main feature.

Nowadays there is no interval and no B movie. But there is a huge array of stuff you can buy before you go into the cinema proper. Giant bags of all kinds of sweets and, of course, popcorn! An american import! I know people who cannot even watch a movie at home without popcorn to accompany it. How strange! And now it seems that some cinema goers also take in burgers, happy meals from fast food outlets, even trays of curry and rice. It seems also that some people want to do the same when they go to the theatre.

The actress Imelda Staunton has been protesting against this. She says it is very distracting for actors to hear the crackle of sweet wrappers and the crunch of crisps when they are on stage putting their all into expressing emotion in a play. A musical, she says, is possibly a different matter; with song and dance going on you don’t notice the crackle and crunch.

She was interviewed on the radio recently and they did a sort of sound test, trying out opening different sorts of packets of sweets and snack. Bumper packs of almost all kinds of sweets fared badly because the packets are made of stiff plasticised paper. Individually wrapped sweets also made a lot of noise. Boxes of Maltesers, provided the outer wrapping is removed before going into the cinema or theatre, are excellent; the box opens quietly and the sweets can be extracted with no noise at all. Crisps are a different matter - always crunchy! Pringles seemed to be doing well at first. The packet can be opened and individual snacks extracted silently but then comes the almighty CRUNCH! The radio presenter suggested that it might be possible to suck the Pringle until it goes soggy but it was generally agreed that this defeated the object of having a crunchy snack.

(How odd to have such a test going on. Almost as odd as the occasion recently when a late night news presenter and her newspaper commentator guests getting excited about hand-sanitiser as they discussed the Coronavirus crisis. The presenter had to exert her authority and get them back on task!) 

On the while, I am with Imelda Staunton on this. I hate sitting in a music concert and hearing the crackle of sweet papers from a row or two behind me.

Almost as bad as people explaining the storyline of a film and pointing out the good bits about to appear on screen!