Theatre audience members who talk, eat, canoodle or scroll are rude, entitled and selfish. Why do they bother?

They’re at it again. Actors moaning about rotten audiences. In an interview this week, Line of Duty star Adrian Dunbar – who later this year will be making his musical theatre debut as Fred Graham in a new production of Kiss Me, Kate at the Barbican – grumbled about the behaviour of theatregoers, calling it “very distracting” to be met in an audience with “one or two people whose faces are lit up” by their phones.

This was the same week the , on stage right now at the tiny Donmar Warehouse as as the bloody thane, revealed that in their show, which requires the audience to wear