SINUOUS energy and spellbinding desire – Scottish Ballet was premiering choreographer David Dawson’s new take on Swan Lake.

It was beautiful, captivating, delicious… so much so that the audience couldn’t wait until the interval to critique it.

Surely that’s the only excuse for talking in the theatre? You’re so uncontrollably overwhelmed by the sights before you that you don’t even realise your tongue is yapping, your tonsils wagging.

Swan Lake was in two acts and each act, two scenes. During set changes the curtain fell while the orchestra continued to play Tchaikovsky’s score as the lights stayed dim.

The idea, and it was expressly asked for in the programme, was that the audience would sit and listen.

Sit and listen? Would they hell. The very instant, the very moment, within a centisecond of the curtain brushing the stage, bedlam and clamour.

It was as though the previous hour the audience had been unwillingly restrained and now, now as soon as the dancers were out of sight – boom. Time to talk and sod the musicians.

Here is a collection of people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting a craft.

All they ask in return is roughly £30 of your money and two hours of your silence.

Why on earth would you hand over £30 of your money if you weren’t going to deploy two hours of silence in order to enjoy the event you’ve paid for?

Worse, can’t you appreciate that other people have similarly paid £30 to enjoy this event and it is the very extreme of arrogance to presume that your two cents holds more value than their right to enjoy a performance free from your running commentary?

Hashtag First World Problems and all that, but it seems like trying to have a cinema trip without someone’s banal banter ruining the experience is an insurmountable task.

Unabashedly sounding like a 1940s Norland nanny, I’ve long moaned about the decline in cinema manners. The fact audiences can’t keep their traps shut in the theatre shows the war is nearly lost.

People talk consistently and at volume through films. They prop their feet up on the seats in front as if they’re in their front room. Actually, they’d never show such disrespect for their own belongings as to put their feet up on their own sofas. They sit on their phones, texting.

They bring in iPads and keep one eye on the big screen and the other on 12 inches of Facebook.

They come in hugely late and, instead of slinking quietly and with embarrassment into the first available seat, they make people move. They walk about in front of the screen searching for their seat.

People don’t give two hoots about anyone else, is the problem. People have no regard for others around them. Technology has shot their attention spans and left them believing there are the star of their own reality show.

Cineworld in Glasgow is rumoured to be introducing a shenanigan called 4DX to its refurbished city centre cinema. 4DX is a horrifying concept one step up from 3D - high-tech motion seats with special effects simulating wind, fog, lightning, bubbles, water, rain and scents.

People are so incapable now of connecting with film, their attention spans are so gnat-like, they need to be periodically puffed in the face with fake wind and sprinkled with fake rain to make sure they’re still watching.

I suggest Cineworld is investing its money in the wrong research.

What is emphatically not needed is fancy tricks and whistles. It’s some kind of technology that forces the basics: a signal blocker to prevent mobile phone use; an electric shock for feet on the seats; some kind of easily removable duct tape for sealing shut jabbering mouths.

It shouldn’t have had to come to this, but it has.

To take it back to the theatre, we need to, as my old ballet teacher would have had it, learn the positions of the feet before we learn the Fouettes Pirouette.

That is, we need to learn to sit in silence and engage with the 2D storytelling in front of us before we’re indulged with bubbles, wind effects and scents.