"Progressive Survival"? We need a BIG conversation!

WHAT  I want to do here, for myself at least, is to move past mourning the theatre we can't have anymore and trying to come up with a model for what kind  of Scottish Theatre we CAN have under the conditions with which we are going to find ourselves confronted and conditioned by for the foreseeable future...before we get to the "unforeseeable new normal" that is going to be our future.  

I profoundly believe that we have the chance of fashioning a sectoral and strategic plan for our own small country...But I as strongly believe that if we leave responses simply to the individual initiative of individuals and producers, we might miss out on our own collective survival.  As with the virus itself, it is only concerted collective action that can protect some...perhaps most...individuals. But that this collective effort needs to be led. And it is leadership I think, however uncomfortably, we need to think about.

We know what the problems are.  If and when public spaces do re-open, it will have to be with social distancing on and off stage. We are not going to be re-opening the Tron or the Lyceum or Dundee Rep at full capacity for some time well beyond the immediate "fire-fighting" that the Westminster and Edinburgh governments have put in place for different kinds of employers and the self-empolyed who make up most of the workforce of the media...printed, broadcast, theatrical.  This may last a year...it may last two till a workable universal vaccine is in place. 

(We hope!)

We will need a strategy that goes past "fire-fighting."  And sector by sector, as we partially lift the lockdown, it is those who work WITHIN parts of our economy, from farming to tourism to Eden Court...we need to inform how it's done...

This will mean, of course, the Scottish Government, among others, making a selection...more or less painful choices about which institutions to preserve and protect for the happy day, however long hence, that they can fully re-open their doors. 

We could, of course, leave it to the marketplace...SOME form of selection is surely coming...but I fear if we don't get organised NOW, Rupert Murdoch will end up owning whatever is left...

(Mr Potter buying up Bedford Falls after the Wall Street Crash springs irresistably to mind...which makes us the Bailey Building and Loan, if you follow the torturous movie reference)

Anyway...I think it is important that we establish a set of agreed social and artistic "values" around which this selection can be organised. Without those values, without leadership, without agreement...then I'm not sure survival can be done...or at least not done "progressively."  

It could be that "progressive survival" is the descriptive phrase for what I want to talk about for Theatre in Scotland.  But that it is exactly the notion of “progressive survival” that we need to coalesce around in the WHOLE economy…from housing to health to manufacture to fishing to the “Bide a Wee “ B and B. And that those who WORK in those sectors must inform the knowledge base for the recovery, as collectively agreed values inform the rationale.

In the meantime, back in MY area of expertise, if "sold out" means that the Lyceum has sold 125 tickets,  or the Tron has sold 50...(and the decison is made by local and national government that these economics are bearable in the meduium terms for a limited number of spaces) we also have to think about what that means for the sector as a whole.

Longer runs of hit shows?  More performances? A core ensemble of actors at maybe six or seven high profile venues? Employing otherwise unavailable telly and movie stars?  A change in the balance of organisations directly in receipt of government support...and thus no longer reliant on the increasingly bust looking "reactive" model of Creative Scotland for strategic arts provision?

I think one way or the other, one way or the other, the centre will probably hold...given a few mortgage holidays...and maybe a hike in already uncomfortably high ticket prices. 

BEYOND that, culturally, socially and and geographically...BEYOND those spaces whose importance to the great and the good will probably ensure some kind of survival...I think the NTS "Scenes for Survival", the Scotsman's short filmed performances and Pitlochry Theatre's commissions of monologues ALSO point a way forward that I think needs to be explored STRATEGICALLY in the wake of the immediate impulse to stay alive.

This is where I think "vlog-casts" might come in.  Where I think we might get Sam Heughan or Karen Gillen to do fifteen minute story reading slots for download on mobile phones and broadcast on BBC Scotland, where "pop up theatres" might perform "survivors' cabarets" in NON theatrical venues, where we look creatively at the spaces and technologies that are available...rather than longing for the creative spaces that are not.

In order to monetise and promote and pay for these activities...these opportunities...we need to think beyond our own bunkers...is all I'm saying. We need to look at pooled advertising revenue as well as government funding...and to do BOTH of those things, I do not believe it is possible NOT to act collectively.  

Or indeed without the broadcasters...

It may well be that these conversations are already happening in the hierarchies above and beyond my paygrade as a freelance playwright with a drawer full of delivered and now un-performable scripts…. And that some folk who read this you are among the ones already doing the talking. But I have been inspired by being lucky enough to be involved in all three of the initiatives undertaken by Pitlochry, The Scotsman and the NTS.  I have also been hugely moved by some of the personal stories that I've been hearing on radio and TV and online. And all of these experiences have made me at least START to think positively about what the hell comes next?

Also, I have to say, the way that Nicola Sturgeon's admonition to treat the public like adults has found a resonance, and the way that this line is now being parroted all over the UK, gives me hope that the leadership the likes of you can offer is going to find supportive echoes in the corridors of power. And her piece in the Herald on Sunday 26^th April is a general call to which this open letter is a response.

Our conversations in the theatre isn Scotland, as elsewhere, need to be adult, wide, democratic and inclusive...and involve artists AND audiences.  To survive at all, let alone survive “progressively”, we are going to HAVE to get our heads together. 

Then just maybe we can make something better than a Survival, and make something we're proud of...that puts in a good place for the day after the day after tomorrow.

Lifting the Lockdown and the Veil of Ignorance

It is now a notorious truism that it is a lot easier to impose “lockdown” than to end it.  You don’t need to understand how society works in order to shut it down, you just have to shut it.  But it turns out that you cannot re-open it without considering in what order in which to do that…and that the order of opening implies an understanding, even a consensus about the ordering of the things that make a society work.

This potential re-ordering of what is important actually started with the lockdown itself.  The lockdown was never – of course not – anything like total. We have already made value judgements between the rate of infection and societal coherence. To give an obvious example, the Health Service was not shut down. The National Health Service underpins, it transpires, absolutely everything else.The protection of its workers, facilities and capabilities turns out to be a good to which all other goods must be sacrificed.

(Not that this is surprising, necessarily, but the revelation that hospital porters and cleaners outrank everyone except doctors and nurses in societal - if not finance of indeed immigration - status, has, or bloody well ought to have, occasioned a bit of a rethink.)

Rather less comfortably, but illustrative of priorities that we are now forced to actually LOOK at, it transpires that the effective protection of the GENERAL health service also trumps the safety of those who live and work in care homes for the elderly and vulnerable. In order to make room for a potential “tsunami” of Covid patients, hospitals had to be emptied of patients who were not at that moment in need of critical care.  And if the consequences in our care homes were tragic, then the Darwinian pragmatics of the ordering of society and its priorities were disquietingly exposed as a consequence.

Similarly, it turns out that people who work in delivery and food retail are actually “essential” to all those bankers and playwrights who can work from home.  And as lockdown is eased on the deceptively consensual idea that “the economy needs to get going again,” similarly brutal realities are exposed. Such as, you have to open schools or provide childcare before people can go to work. Thus, according to the Daily Mail, “teachers (and children) must be heroes.” To which the predictable responses of teachers, (as well as children and their parents) is “you first, mate!”

hat we are doing in the easing of lockdown, in putting our societies back together in a specific order of re-openings is that we are making conscious, practical choices about how those societies actually function, in the order of what we actually value most. Postal workers and delivery drivers are modern aristocrats by this measure. This understanding was quite impossible when we were stuck in the Trumpian universe we used to live in, where handing out free money to people who were already rich was the answer to all of life’s little difficulties. But it is, however briefly, possible now.

As I write, it appears too that it is currently the judgement of the Prime Minister that it is more important to the nation that he hangs on to his personal focus group Svengali than the entire public health strategy of the last ten weeks is fatally undermined. All of which goes to show that one consequence of the beginning of the end of lockdown, or at least the end of the beginning, is that value judgements about what matters in the ordering of society and what matters most to us, indeed, who “we” are, is no longer a simple matter of vapid rhetoric about all being in it together. We are bound to get a bit controversial.

"The Veil of Ignorance" might be a useful thing to think about as we plan to lift the lockdown. The idea, associated most with American thinker John Rawls, is that, as a mental exercise and way of judging what happens in the "real world," you set about designing a social system with no foreknowledge of your own position in it.Given that "normal,"for a lot of people (as in the phrase "back to normal") was and is pretty crappy, the idea is to imagine a just economy (in terms of housing, health, cultural activity etc etc) where you and your ethnic or social group have NO guarantee of being at the top.

Most people who get to design societies, from Solon to Solomon or Jefferson to Lenin, (let alone UK civil servants) have imagined themselves to be in charge of their dream projects...because, through violence or the inherited benefits of violence, they WERE. But we live in a democracy, and in a democracy, we theoretically get to debate and agree how we want to live: what matters most and in what order.

I suggest that we are in the the "Vale of the Veil of Ignorance" right now...in that we know everything is going to change, but none of us has the first idea to what. We are getting to debate and agree on some of this stuff right now...from the explosion of food distribution charities, to clapping for carers and as we come out of lockdown, we have a limited window of choosing what we actually WANT from the New Normal, of speaking aloud the unspoken consensus we are actually already using to make decisions.

To illustrate the uncertainty personally, playwrights and others have been asking Arts Councils and government ministers for years to consciously and openly decide whether they really want a professional theatre sector in Scotland or not, and to act on that choice. Guess what? Something like that decision about whether the kind of theatre we have been making in the kind of way we've been doing it actually matters is actually GOING TO HAPPEN in the next year or so! As the Prime Mnister will no doubt learn this week, the answers to your questions may not be what you thought. I only hope my bcolleagues and I can make a better case for ourselves than he did.

Less myopically, lifting lockdown on a whole society brings, I think, an obligation to at least partially articulate the principles on which we can agree to its functioning. And that we MAKE those choices without knowing where in the new hierarchy we ourselves will end up! And if it turns out that the "new normal", is lazily indistinguishable from the rotten, corrupt old one, well, it will turn out that that is who we are, that is who we choose to be.

It may well be that this is already happening. Maybe we should be talking about it.