Kaushik Sen

Actor and director, Swapna Sandhani

I had stopped my show, Kolkatar Elektra, at Odeon 2004 when a mobile rang and asked the owner of the phone to leave the auditorium. Other members of the audience also supported me. This is the only way this nuisance can be stopped. I do not know why we, theatre performers, do not protest. Once a person is made to face this embarassment he will remember the experience and mend his ways. When there is a facility of a vibrator mode on every set, why do people have to let the phone ring? If there are senior artistes on stage, they have the experience to recover from the interruption and carry on. But such breaks hamper the performance of new artistes. I heard from colleagues who attended Naseeruddin Shah’s The Prophet a few months ago that before the show started, a group member came on stage holding a cellphone, played out a number of ringtones and then announced that he was switching it off. So the great actor also must have suffered.