Paul Woolley writes, "When we try to preserve moments digitally, we risk losing them altogether...
In recent weeks, Olivier Award-winning actor Lesley Manville has sparked debate by criticising theatregoers who take photos during curtain calls. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, she urged audiences to ‘take the digital out of it for just a moment,’ adding, ‘Come on, it’s theatre – let’s preserve it!’ This article is from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity section on Connecting with Culture.
Currently starring in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, Manville described how the phenomenon, in which ‘virtually the whole audience’ reach for their phones, is beginning to ‘filter in’ from Broadway to the West End. For her, the act feels intrusive: ‘We are all in this room, we are telling you a story… clap or don’t clap, but don’t just stick your phone in our face. I find it insulting.’
I’m a big fan of Manville as an actor, and I think she has a point. One of the less attractive features of contemporary culture is our impulse to capture everything. The instinct is understandable: we want to hold on to meaningful moments. Yet in trying to preserve them, we risk losing them. The act of recording can distance us from the experience itself. Rather than deepening our engagement, it can diminish it.
In 1977, Susan Sontag observed in her book On Photography that ‘photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can’t possess reality, one can possess images.’ Her words feel increasingly prescient. A photograph may offer a record, but it cannot replicate the richness of being present, the atmosphere, the emotion, the shared experience of a live performance.
The Bible offers a strikingly different posture. ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46:10). This invitation calls for attentiveness: setting aside distractions and becoming fully present. To ‘know’ in this deep, biblical sense requires more than observation. It requires participation: mind, body, and spirit engaged in the moment before us.
That kind of attentiveness is difficult when our attention is divided between experience and documentation. A photograph can never truly capture a moment; it can only freeze a fragment of it. What we gain in image, we often lose in presence.
For followers of Jesus, this raises an important challenge. To love God and neighbour well we must be attentive, both to God’s presence and to the needs of others. Presence is not passive. It is an active, generous way of living.
So perhaps Manville’s plea is about more than theatre etiquette. It’s a call to recover presence in a distracted age. To ‘take the digital out of it’ more often is not to diminish life, but to enrich it – to experience more deeply, to notice more fully, and to love more attentively.
Paul Woolley
CEO, LICC
This article is from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity section on Connecting with Culture.