I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Gillian Anderson. The actress, who shot to fame in The X-Files, has an aura of icy froideur in many of the roles she plays (think of Detective Inspector Stella Gibson confronting Jamie Dornan’s Belfast serial killer in The Fall). It’s a characteristic that spills over into real life too at times. Anderson made headlines over the weekend for a frosty stage-door encounter with autograph-hunting fans, telling a few of them that “you cannot sit in the front row – it’s so distracting. You can’t come 20 times and sit in the front row. It’s driving me mad.” Goodness. What’s going on here?

At first glance, Anderson seems all manner of off. If an actor doesn’t want devoted fans turning up to watch night after night, it’s probably a good idea not to do theatre – and certainly not to star in a play in so intimate a venue as Soho Place, where she opened to acclaim last week in Edward Albee’s 1962 marital humdinger, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This boutique in-the-round venue offers audience members the chance to get up close and personal with the performers. In my piece about the production, I observed that “so close are we to the action that we too feel like guests at the ill-advised 2am after-party drinks at George and Martha’s” (Anderson’s Martha plays opposite a blisteringly fine Billy Crudup as George).

Above all else, my initial instinct on hearing the exchange was to marvel at how anyone could sit through this play twice in quick succession, let alone multiple times. I still feel drained from last week’s opening night, as three and a half hours of a married couple tearing each other apart makes for a drama of exhausting emotional heft. (On a more pragmatic note, how can anyone afford pricey West End tickets for a sell-out show night after night?)

If Anderson truly is distracted by punters in the first row, what about those in the second? What’s her cut-off point? Is it everyone in the nearest seats or just some of them? Multiple actors have, after all, bemoaned poor audience behaviour in recent months, often citing inappropriate phone use or ill-timed munching of noisy and/or smelly food. 

The mystery deepened – and then Anderson took to social media to offer a clarification of sorts. “The video doing the rounds is me talking with women I go back over 20 years with,” she wrote elliptically, before urging against anger toward them. This suggests long-standing, or possibly obsessive, fandom, a theory supported by the voice of an unseen person in the clip responding with “I know” and “sorry” to Anderson’s reprimands.

If it is this, then my sympathy swings a little in Anderson’s direction. The role of Martha – intelligent, bored, sexually frustrated and emotionally devastated – is an almighty ask of an actress (Elizabeth Taylor won her second Oscar for the role in the film version), and crawling on hands and knees in a state of undress around the perimeter of the living room set might well feel a little too exposed for comfort. 

Then again, it is not the prerogative of performers to pre-select their audiences, removing potential annoyances or distractions. It is their job to play their parts and to keep going, stopping only in the most unforeseen of circumstances.

Of course, if certain spectators are being abusive, obstructive or disturbing fellow theatregoers, the matter becomes more serious, but there are no reports of audience-on-audience complaints during Virginia Woolf. Thus it seems that the sole infraction committed was that of sitting in the front row. Anderson would do well to recall Ethel Merman’s line in “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, that eternal paean to the acting profession. “There’s no people like show people/They smile when they are low.” So, chin up, Gillian, all your hard work is bound to pay off when awards season rolls around once again.