Actors reveal worst stage interruptions

How do actors cope when a mobile phone - or worse - disrupts a performance? Here they share their horror stories.

"I just grit my teeth and bear it," says Sir Derek Jacobi on the subject of mobile phone interruptions.

"I can't do what several well-known actors have done - walk to the edge of the stage to say 'for God's sake turn your phone off!'"

Although most theatres implore patrons to switch off mobiles, plays can still get ruined by ringtones.

"Every theatre puts out an announcement, but it's amazing how many people are deaf to it," says Sir Derek.

In 2012, it's not just been mobile phone interruptions that have made headlines.

In November, Sir Peter Hall apologised to Downton Abbey actress Laura Carmichael after he unintentionally disrupted her West End debut in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

The audience at the Vaudeville Theatre heard Sir Peter speaking loudly in the stalls during the play's emotional final scene. The 81-year-old later said he had been "disorientated" after falling asleep.

Not all interruptions come from the auditorium.

Simon Russell Beale had to leave the stage during a performance of Timon of Athens at the National Theatre in September after he slipped over and dislocated his finger.

"When I looked down my finger was like a Z shape," Beale recalls. "I said: 'ladies and gentleman, I think I've broken my hand.'"

Beale was dressed as a "down and out" and smeared with tomatoes when he fell, so he took the time to shower and change out of his costume before going to hospital.

Hannah Waddingham, currently in Kiss Me, Kate at the Old Vic, says: "I've had plenty of accidents, with fire, a live mouse in my costume, but not anything from the audience."

Mobile phone interruptions, in her opinion, are "par for the course".

But actress Hattie Morahan, back next year as Nora in A Doll's House at the Young Vic, recalls an awkward opening night incident in Martin Crimp's The City at the Royal Court in 2008.

"In the first scene I had a very long speech and someone's phone went off very loudly and continued to ring. It's was in this tiny theatre and we almost stopped, but we just kept going. It went on for about five minutes!"

"Mobile phone interruptions don't happen as much as people think it does," says Julian Bird, chief executive of the Society of London Theatre. "When it hits the headlines it's when someone famous on stage stops the performance."

Perhaps the most famous example is when Richard Griffiths ordered a woman out of his West End play Heroes in 2005 after her mobile phone rang for a third time.

A year earlier, Griffiths had ordered a man out of the National Theatre when his phone went off for the sixth time during a performance of The History Boys.

"Phones go off all the time and if I'm speaking I tend to stop speaking and wait for it to finish and carry on," says Tamsin Greig, star of this year's West End transfer of Jumpy.

She admits her own phone went off once while she was in the audience at London's intimate 250-seat Donmar Warehouse

"I was sitting on the front row of the Donmar - literally the worst theatre space for it to go off," she cringes. "People make mistakes, I understand that, but we're all just stupid - just turn them off!"

The front row of the Donmar is the scene of another bizarre interruption, as the theatre's former artistic director Michael Grandage recalls.

"There was a horrific moment in one of our plays where a couple on the front row were far more interested in each other than they were in the work on the stage.

"The actors were having a terrible time because the audience wasn't looking at them, but at the two people making out.

"I didn't want to stop them enjoying themselves, so I asked them at the interval if they wanted to continue backstage. For some reason they got all respectful and decided they'd put it off until after the show!"