The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc everywhere. At least we can be certain that schools will re-open, as will sports stadia, cinemas and galleries. But some jeremiahs are predicting that, unless there is some kind of drastic financial intervention by the government very soon, 70 per cent of Britain’s theatres will disappear down the plughole.
This will have severe economic as well as cultural consequences. As many people go to the theatre every year as they do to football matches—34m of them. Theatre revenues in 2018 stood at £1.28bn, with the cultural sector overall providing £32.3bn to the nation’s economy. In London alone, in 2019, the theatre paid £133m in VAT.
It seems as if the government doesn’t understand the figures and the extent to which it needs the theatre to be successful. France and Spain have already made emergency tax measures available to their theatre industries.
One or two theatres—the Nuffield, Southampton, and the Southport Theatre in Lancashire—have already gone into liquidation, countless productions nationwide have been lost, and most theatres are engaged in cost-cutting and redundancies as their scant resources disappear by the day. Pantomime is the cornerstone of most regional theatres’ economic survival and unless they can plan for full houses by the end of August, many of them will simply close down.
The wealthiest London producer, and theatre owner, Cameron Mackintosh, is losing millions by the week, shedding staff around the world and sitting tight for a green light in the spring. The five-step roadmap announced by culture secretary Oliver Dowden—the man who said it was fine for theatres to open as long as they didn’t perform anything—is reasonable enough but, with no dates attached, the industry is dancing in the dark and running on empty.
Which is why there are mutinous stirrings already, notably the announcement that Ian McKellen will play Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Windsor… some time soon. Rehearsals, which are allowed in Dowden’s plan, began on 29th June. On the same morning, a drive-in live performance of the rock musical Six (about Henry VIII’s wives) was announced, touring 12 sites across the UK in August and September. These two ventures may precipitate Dowden’s third step, which allows for outdoor performances with an audience, plus pilots for indoor shows. In both cases social distancing is still applicable.
Theatre without an audience “in the room where it happens”—to quote a lyric in the now suspended hip-hop musical Hamilton—is simply not theatre. But, following the example of the football season resuming behind closed doors with an invisible television audience, the Old Vic has re-mounted a few performances of its recent hit Lungs, by Duncan Macmillan, on the stage of an empty theatre.
The performances have been completely sold out online, but the play is only possible in these circumstances because it is an inherently socially-distanced two-hander—and the actors are box office stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith. In other words, this is not a template for any kind of meaningful continuation of theatre as we know it.
What it might be, however, is a suggestion of how theatre might proceed if enough thought or imagination is put into it. There surely has to be some re-shaping of auditoria—seats are detachable in most theatres. New exits and entrances could be increased to reduce bottlenecks, productivity scaled down, resources cut back and, if unavoidable, salaried staff cut to the bone.
One former artistic director of a leading regional theatre recently said to me that the sight of a hugely expensive design at the National Theatre—and they are the norm, not the exception—made him cringe with resentment; it represented his entire budget for the year. And this was before the pandemic.
Anna Fleischle, an award-winning designer, has defined “a moment of reset in our industry.” Rachel O’Riordan, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, says she is looking at the public square outside the theatre on King Street. West End producers know that the days of the premium ticket and rip-off booking charges are over. And one can only say to all three parties: what took you so long?
The National must be preserved in some heavily reduced shape or form. The Royal Shakespeare Company is long overdue a complete re-boot. Now is not the time to carry on as normal. New ventures include a new company set up by Nigel Havers, which starts touring, he thinks, with Noël Coward’s Private Lives on 1st October. And the Sheffield Crucible has committed to outdoor Shakespeare in the city at some date soon to be confirmed.
Meanwhile the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project has done an excellent job. Taking a lead from Alan Bennett’s re-launched Talking Heads, writers and actors have collaborated in a series of short 10- or 15-minute plays shown in half-hour segments under the generic title Unprecedented.
Nuggets have gleamed in the lockdown gloaming. In April de Angelis’s Neighbours, for instance, a Zoom drinks party accelerates like vintage Ayckbourn from false bonhomie into rancorous dismay. For one woman, a social distance of two metres in her marriage is not nearly enough. Another posh lady rambles on about her Volvo when she means something more intimately biological. And by the time the technophobe outsider has successfully “joined,” the assembly has disintegrated.
Just as Talking Heads—which started on television in 1987 before making its way into the theatre—is a showcase for the rich acting talents of our day, so Unprecedented has brought us beautiful work from Meera Syal and Gemma Arterton, while Jodie McNee and Rory Kinnear delivered a verbatim account of NHS workers on the front line as richly disturbing, and dramatic, as anything in the past few weeks.
These playlets interestingly correspond exactly to Samuel Beckett’s theatre of comic existentialism. This, along with the new minimalism, will surely feed back onto our reanimated stages. The double act of David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Staged, for instance, another little humdinger on BBC iPlayer (with drop-in cameos from Samuel L Jackson and Judi Dench), about two rivalrous out-of-work actors going slightly to seed, suggests a brilliant new comedy for tomorrow’s West End. Perhaps it could be a successor to Ben Elton’s stage play Upstart Crow with David Mitchell, a hilarious take on the Bard that was cut off at the knees when London theatre went suddenly dark.
Just as it did for Shakespeare himself in a couple of plague-induced closures in his time. When the Puritans shut the theatres for 18 years in 1642, this arrant Philistinism proved a launch pad for the glories of Restoration comedy, just as the Old Vic, the National in embryo, and Sadler’s Wells Ballet were interrupted by the Second World War, only to regroup and relaunch victoriously (the Wells ballet as the Royal Ballet). Out of catastrophe comes a new flowering.
Let’s hope the holding operation of television monologues and Zoom drama is not in vain. For it is writers and actors, holding the mirror up to nature, who will provide civic as much as economic renewal.
