Among the cacophony of nuisances that peck at my brain and fell me, kicking and (silently) screaming from the land of suspended disbelief this was a new one on me. A new form of torture.
I have ranted, not necessarily originally but with sincere vehemence, about the ubiquitous mobile phone lighting up auditoriums like Christmas trees.
I have despaired at the inability of people to let babysitters, secretaries, West Ham, do their jobs without intervention from self-absorbed so-and-so's who consider the phone to be solely an instrument of posy self-aggrandisement.
I have gnashed my teeth and rent my garments over the driving, selfish desire of people to attend performances on a highlight-only, need-to-know basis - that is, darting in and out of the foyer to take and make calls while they presume the action on stage or screen is flagging.
I have said many times and in many ways that hell is other people and there are lots of other people in theatres. And they all thinking that hiding a phone in the lap eliminates the glow from the screen (it doesn't, people, it just doesn't) or that boiled sweets are best unwrapped s-l-ow-l-y or that we all want to know that they know how it's going to end.
But this one, during a performance of The History Boys at Greenwich Theatre, entered a new realm of temple-thwacking, granny-kicking madness.
To the left of me, an obsessive (always the worst). His obsession was cracking his knuckles. Relentlessly. Seriously. And he had, like most of us, 10 digits so it was a Forth Bridge of a job - crack, pop, crack, pop. He harvested the joint relief from one round before promptly starting on the next.
He was young so my only revenge is the sure knowledge of his early on-set arthritis. A mixed blessing, of course, because, while he will be deprived of the ability to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2 at the Albert Hall (tee hee), I will be similarly deprived of the ability to ruin his performance with a bubble-wrap and yoga marathon in the front row.
But knuckle-cracking, like yawning, appears to be contagious. To the right of me, a Facebook-lugging loon began work on his own clattering paws. Less fruitful than the gibbon to my left, he took to extraordinary feats of contortion to earn his "pop".
Fingers yanked back till they were paled and bloodless. Or bent till they were twisted like a foetus. He strained. I strained. We both hung on for the sweet joy of release.
In the end, the whole performance was like a Castanet Convention in Madrid. Imagine the noise the skeletons made while skewering Jason and the Argonauts. Or the timpani of butchers in Smithfield as they collapse a pig by hand. It was that. A whole performance delivered in Morse by tricky-fingered haters.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
