Theatre-goers walk out on Jeremy Irons

When Jeremy Irons signed up to appear in Michael Jacobs’s play Impressionism on Broadway he took the opportunity of sucking up to his audience in advance, saying that American theatre-goers were more appreciative than their "closed-off" British counterparts. However, it appears that his charm offensive has proved in vain. According to the Daily Telegraph, the production is so bad that preview audiences are deserting the theatre in droves at the interval.

This is not, it seems, down to Irons, who won an Oscar for his role in Reversal of Fortune, in which he played the suspected murderer Klaus von Bulow, but due to apparent faults with the play itself, which has been described as "pretty much incomprehensible".

However, one the play’s producers, Bill Haber, has come up with a novel way of holding the audience captive. The Telegraph reports that he is planning to cut Impressionism, which also stars Joan Allen, to just one act - a fail-safe way of gluing the audience to their seats. ·