Corona Diaries: We Did a Theatre!
21.08.2020
When the theatres closed down they did so in a fog of confusion. At first we had no idea that this virus was really coming for us. It was something we were going to be unscathed by. VAULT Festival was in full swing and every night hundreds of people packed themselves into the Leake Street Tunnels underneath waterloo station, sitting side by side in the theatre, laughing, shouting, hugging, kissing. And then suddenly it happened very fast. After a short period of its fate hanging in the balance VAULT Festival announced its closure, leaving a number of shows without the performance opportunities they’d been working towards for months. After a series of ever more obtuse announcements from the government in which they simultaneously advised against going to the theatre and refused to order the closure of said theatres, the West End finally submitted to the catastrophe and every single show closed abruptly.
For my husband and I, the majority of our work is centralised in theatre. Since initial thinking was that theatres would be closed for just a few weeks, money wasn’t an immediate issue, more the lack of purpose, the anxiety surrounding something so abnormal. But we didn’t immediately miss theatre in the way I’d always assumed I would. For a little while all the people toiling hard in the background, campaigning on twitter, signing petitions, eager to keep working, keeping creating seemed like a different species to me. I was briefly grateful for the break from the consistent hustle, of always feeling one step behind other theatre makers, other playwrights. I missed theatre in an abstract way, the way you feel when a relative you rarely saw dies, sad but not hugely impacted, with no touchstone to drive home that it’s actually happened.
Of course that hasn’t remained. After many happy hours watching TV in a way I’ve possibly never done before (lots of recommendations to impart by the way) I’m itchy to be working towards something. Money is starting to be a concern. The viability of a career in theatre is beginning to seem worryingly questionable. The inability to experience live performance with other humans is becoming depressing. We’re seeing theatre after theatre closing down, thousands of creatives out of work, freelancers forgotten by Rishi Sunak’s policies. It’s a battle for producers to keep their teams above water, never mind protecting the shows themselves. We talk a good game in our profession about the importance of theatre, the essential nature of it. I think that when this all first started, that suddenly seemed ridiculous, an over estimation next to the actual necessity of doctors, nurses, key workers. But now, with months without it, its absence is jarring.
On 9th July the government allowed that open air performances could restart. The industry immediately responded and within 24 hours contracts were being signed. Finally there was a little spark of light. One of these industry professionals who leapt to the challenge with aplomb is director Sean Turner who, within a week, had set up and programmed an entire month’s festival at an outdoor venue in Wandsworth. I phoned to enquire and before I knew what was happening I’d committed to staging my play If This Is Normal for one night only at this New Normal Festival. Between socially distanced rehearsals, Covid-19 testing, adapting for an outdoor space and keeping everyone in a bubble in the run up to the show it was a nerve-wracking undertaking. But underneath is all was a disbelieving excitement that we were doing it again, that we were making theatre. Not for critics or industry or anything like that. Just for the pure joy of it. Just because we could.
A fellow theatre maker said that he felt emotional when he arrived at the venue and saw the play in action upon the stage. He echoed some of my own earlier feelings, that he’d been more concerned about the humans in our profession, their safety, health and incomes to mull over the loss of theatre itself. If you’d asked him he might not have said that he’d missed it, that the emotional impact of trying to keep business afloat was too full-on and that otherwise he’d been happy to discover other aspects to his life during lockdown. But walking into the space, seeing actors bring text to life, hearing an audience clap and laugh and gasp, he was struck again by the magic of theatre, the excitement of shared experience. I felt the same way.
