Has Movie And Theatre Audience Behaviour In Sydney Gotten Worse?

We’ve all had a less-than-deseriable experience watching a movie or seeing a live show. A full-brightness phone in the front row of a movie theatre taking a picture of the screen, the awkward tension of a ringtone at a quiet moment, a slightly-too-loud cacophony of voices behind you; spotty audience behaviour is a part of experiencing art that we always hope is the exception rather than the rule.

Recently though, I’ve had a particularly long string of bad experiences with audience behaviour in Sydney that have made me consider if it’s more than just me being unlucky. It came to a head last week at MJ the Musical, where I experienced both someone right next to me being on their phone for much of the first act and people loudly talking amongst one another during the second.

It was the proverbial straw that broke this camel’s usually quite hardened back. I’ve experienced someone scrolling Reddit on full brightness for five minutes during a theatrical Lord of the Rings marathon, loud talking and phone usage at the opera during La Traviata and two people in my screening of Heart Eyes who were providing loud, benign commentary the whole time as if they were watching it at home.

I know I’m not the only person who’s experienced this. During 2023 in particular, one of the first years we could consider ‘post-COVID’, a number of pieces from high-profile publications like the Sydney Morning Herald, BBC and The Guardian covered the issue.

For instance, a study from theatre union Bectu in the UK published a study in early 2023 that 90% of theatre workers had seen poor audience behaviour (getting as bad as physical violence) and 70% think it had gotten worse during the pandemic. If you’re looking for some horrific reading, you can also see this Guardian article where readers pitched in with their own stories of nightmare audiences at the movies.

I’ve never experienced anything quite as bad as a physical altercation in a movie theatre, and I’ve had plenty of positive experiences lately. But the sentiment is the same from cinema and theatre regulars: general etiquette in these shared spaces has deteriorated substantially in the years after the pandemic. As Christopher Bantick writes for the Sydney Morning Herald: “We are fast reaching a state where going to a concert or play the expectation is for audience behaviour to be uneven at best. It is not snooty or elitist to expect better.”

I like to think I have a pretty high tolerance to this sort of thing. As a chronic theatre snacker myself, I’d be a hypocrite if I lambasted people for “eating too loudly” in an auditorium (though I try my best to be quiet!). I honestly do understand that sometimes people have good reasons for checking their phones in the theatre, and I really do value cinema and theatre as a communal experience.

But there’s simply no excuse for talking at room volume mid-performance or using your phone so much it inhibits the performance or film for both you and the people around you. It’s happened enough times recently that I’ve caught myself worrying about an audience behaviour before I even walk into a theatre or cinema.

I know that this isn’t an issue that’ll ever truly go away, frustrating as it is. Nonetheless, I know I’d at least appreciate it if we got back to a point where I could stop worrying so much about if people in my audience will play up and only be concerned with the show or film playing in front of me.