It turns out that if there’s one thing more expensive than making theatre, it’s not making it. Empty buildings haemorrhage money. Postponing a show already in rehearsal or raising the curtain only for it to be dropped shortly after — as happened in December when theatres reopened just to close days later — scares off investors and unsettles audiences. (I might also say that being unable to gather as a community to make sense of the world through stories is costly not just in a financial sense. But then I am a pretentious playwright.) No, what we need is to begin filling our diaries once again with plays, musicals, comedy gigs and concerts. What the live arts need is certainty.
The government’s decision to extend Covid restrictions means keeping audience capacities at 50 per cent. I’m not a lockdown sceptic, and there’s nothing more important than people’s safety, but most shows need above 80 per cent to break even, and producers had to make their call months ago. Cinderella needs a dress stitched for the ball, and Iago rehearsal time to concoct his wicked schemes. Not to mention the 200,000 theatre freelancers who have been without income for more than a year and just need work. Buoyed by the vaccine rollout, most producers went all-in on the government’s original roadmap. They had to. Our playhouses hadn’t been shut this long since the Interregnum (though that was puritanism, not plague).
And oh what happiness it brought me to walk back into a theatre this week — places of magic! Wonder! Provocations! Love! So-so wine! To the National Theatre for Under Milk Wood in the Olivier auditorium, named after its founder and designed in the Greek amphitheatre vein.
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