Russia’s oldest theatre is jamming mobile phone signals during performances. The Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg became the first theatre company in the world to instal jamming equipment, after previous attempts to get patrons to switch off their phones failed, reported the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
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The theatre said it was forced to introduce the measure after a ringing mobile phone wrecked a recent performance of Leo Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse. The central character, Fedor Protasov, decides to kill himself after his wife accidentally marries someone else.
“It was towards the end. Just as the hero was about to shoot himself someone’s mobile phone started to ring,” Yekaterina Slepishkova, a spokeswoman for the theatre – founded in 1756 – told the Guardian. “It was awful. We ask people to turn their phones off before every performance. But they simply don’t listen.
“We turn the system on just before the performance. We switch it off during the interval and on again for the second half. So far it’s been a resounding success.”