Now here's the tricky bit. Are you:
   (a.) at the Globe Theatre in 1603, or
   (b.) at La Boite Theatre in 2003?

If your answer is "Lock in B - La Boite, thanks Marc", congratulations! You're correct! (You win all your parents' love.)

Last month Kevin Spacey, in his new role as artistic director of London's Old Vic Theatre, warned theatregoers that if they could not turn off their mobile phones or insisted on rustling sweet papers, they should stay away. Quel horreur!

It would appear he - like many others - is fed up with the constant mobile phone-using, serial text-messaging, chicken-smuggling, lolly-crunching, loud-talking antics of theatre and cinema audiences of the new millennium. And, in some respects, who can blame him?

For starters - and despite the constant reminders to turn them off - it's becoming increasingly rare to attend a play/movie/concert/funeral that isn't hijacked by the insidiously chipper tone of a ringing mobile.

"Mobile phones are a pain, with SMS a particular nightmare," admits Sean Mee, La Boite's artistic director. "And plastic water bottles are my personal nemesis. People seemed to be able to make it through a show without having to rehydrate in the past..."

But while mobile phones (and the odd water bottle) are the weapon of choice for most thoughtless audience members, there are certainly far more outlandish audience antics on the go. According to La Boite publicist Rosemary Herbert, a Year 11 student once smuggled a live chicken into a performance of Still Standing.

"Apparently the chicken was the student's biology behavioural science project, and he was teaching the chicken to come when called," she said. Um...okay.

As La Boite is a theatre-in-the-round, audiences are closer than usual to performers - and their props. What this means, says Herbert, is that audience members have, on occasion, attempted to take props during the interval.

One fellow during the interval of Zigzag Street plucked a Tim Tam out of the prop packet on the set. When questioned by the front of house manager, he said: "I thought it'd go well with my coffee, surely they can spare one?"

Give an audience too long in a darkened theatre and the words "Impromptu Light Show" apparently spring to mind. It was laser pointers a-go-go during the opening seven minutes of intentional pitch black for Queensland Theatre Company's Black Comedy earlier this year.

But this nothing compared with what happened at Jolson - The Musical at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London when an amorous couple engaged in oral sex during the show.

When not eating the props, playing with laser pointers, text messaging friends, having sex or bringing a chicken as their date, audience members are increasingly commentating their way through plays, as though watching a DVD at home.

In 2001, when actress Rebecca Murphy took the role of the cool bass-playing aunt in the hit comedy 48 Shades of Brown, the revelation that her character was gay would usually be met with at least one loud, "OMMIGAWD, SHE'S A LESBIAN!" by someone in the audience.

"It can be hard to keep acting on stage when you can hear members of the audience going into great depth about your hair colour, the size of your breasts and your character's attitude," laughs Murphy. "It's like they think we can't hear them!"

So the question is, is Spacey right to be peeved? Is audience etiquette currently going to hell in a hand basket? Is boorish behaviour The New Black? It's a resounding no, according to Murphy and Mee. Most audiences, they say, are great.

Going to the theatre should never be about behaving properly to the point of having no fun. It's about getting caught up in a story that's unfolding in front of your eyes and then fiercely debating the characters/themes/lack of Tim Tams with your friends and family on the way home.

Theatre has long suffered an image problem, as though it's a "posh" form of entertainment for the intellectual rich. Argh, no way!