Rosamund Pike kept her composure after a phone alarm in the front row interrupted a performance of Inter Alia on Saturday afternoon. The actress reportedly berated an audience member last month for using their phone during the performance at Wyndham's Theatre in London.
Previous Incident
Pike, who won an Olivier award for her role as a crown court judge in Suzie Miller's play, said the texter had broken the bond between cast and audience, according to The Times.
Saturday's Disruption
On Saturday, a front-row audience member failed to notice a phone alarm ringing for over a minute. After the show, Pike refrained from comments but reportedly glared at the woman when the phone was finally retrieved from her handbag and silenced.
One audience member in the second row said: "At first I thought the noise was part of the backing track, it was going on for so long. But it seemed entirely unfitting with the tone of the scene, about halfway through the play, in which the actors were engaged in quiet conversation. I felt so bad for Rosamund and the rest of the cast, especially after what happened a few weeks ago. She shot the audience member a glare and it seemed to have distracted her from the scene, although she remained entirely professional in her performance."
Staff Comments
A front-of-house staff member noted the difficulty of controlling mobile phone use, saying: "It genuinely was at least a minute. It was an alarm on a phone ringing. It's hard to know if it threw the cast off. I'd imagine it's more on Rosamund's mind right now, as well, because of the last thing and it being in the front row again. We'll see if she makes a kind of statement about it. If it's within the middle of the row, there's not much we can do because you have to decide whether you're going to make more of a disruption by trying to signal to them than the actual thing itself. Usually people realise sooner than that, I'm not sure what was going on with this."
