After the Darkness, Should There Be a New Deal for Scottish Theatre? We'll Need to Make Sure We Deserve It.

Whisper it. The closure of the Lyceum in Edinburgh until at least the spring might be just be the start. You see that “New Normal” everyone keeps talking about being just round the corner?  This might be it. It might already be here. The Titanic may already have hit the iceberg.

I’ve just started work on a long promised commission of a script for the National Theatre of Scotland. I’m one of the lucky ones.  I’m hugely grateful for the faith and support.  I also have to face the fact that I might be writing an adaptation of a well-known Scottish novel for a cast of eight to ten actors who will NEVER perform the play in front of a full, live audience. They might have to tell the story on a studio set, sitting and standing at least six feet apart from one another.  I suppose there MIGHT be an audience of some kind there, at about one fifth of capacity, who’ve all signed an indemnity form and got their temperatures taken as they went in.

 

Or maybe the audience will consist solely of three or four television camera people on a set no doubt brilliantly designed and lit, but never to be seen by a live audience at all.  What I might be writing is a 100 minute television feature, perhaps played “as live” but all shot in a controlled, socially distanced space that in six months’ time, or a year’s time…or TWO years’ time…be what “a theatre” is.

Now I can do that. I might even get quite excited, artistically, by the prospect of doing something like that. But, and this is the real point I’m pursuing with this daydream, who the hell is going to pay for it? It won’t make any box office income…and even the budget of the National Theatre of Scotland is going to have to deal not only with that restriction of income, but also the recession which is already accompanying the epidemic and which right now has shut down a third of everything without anything resembling, as far as I can see, a realistic plan for eventually re-opening restaurants on an economically sound basis, never mind theatres that people might actually want to go to for a good night out.

We don’t KNOW anything for sure, of course, our destiny, like everybody else’s, is not in our own hands.  But even if it’s only for the next six months, this is what the world of theatre, TV and film production, is already ACTUALLY like. This IS normality.  And even if a political decision is made now that means theatre DOES still exist in Scotland next year, it’s going to be under wholly different economic and societal circumstances to those that prevailed ten weeks ago.  And what those circumstances are…a universal and trusted vaccination programme being underway or not…is radically uncertain.

Therefore, I am arguing that right now we in theatre need to make the case for ourselves collectively as a public good.  We may very well need to break the fiscal and organisational structures created after World War 2 to do it. If we insist on doing so from our own separate islands of funding and governance, very few of us are going to make it.  It’s not just the Lyceum.  And it’s not just an echo of what is happening in theatre in London or the English regions.  We already have a distinct corporate identity, and it is time to use that identity to tell government and people in Scotland their own particular story.

We need to make sure that live performance is part of a sustained and collective effort to revive the educational, retail, tourism and leisure sectors of our economy and culture...as well as entertainment.  We won’t make it on institutional special pleading. I also believe we will respond better and with more agility if we respond together and we respond publically and early.  And that we might be a damn sight more successful at attracting corporate sponsorship, for example, if we get a bit corporate ourselves in the demonstrable public interest.

Realistically, I expect a whole series of “New Normalities” of which where we have been and where we are now…EMERGENCY and CRITICAL…are the only two stages of recovery we can yet begin to describe…for the theatre as for schools and shops and everything else.  Even if we are lucky enough to escape CRITICAL shading back into EMERGENCY once or twice, I think we still have the CONVALESCENCE and RECUPERATION Stages of Recovery to come. I think we’re going to have to adjust ourselves to each new normal in turn for I don’t know how long …and nor does anyone else.

But if we want the “new normality” to be healthy when it DOES come, maybe even healthier than normality was when it died forever ten weeks ago, then we need to involve everyone with a stake in Scottish Theatre in what Scottish Theatre becomes.  That’s more than just the writers, directors, designers, actors, crew, front of house staff and administrators. That’s audiences. That’s everyone who pays tax or buys a Lottery Ticket.  That’s funding organisations locally and nationally. That’s the governments who pay the funders’ wages and set their parameters. Whether you know it or not yet, and whether you like it or not, this conversation includes you. We are either part of an integrated new vision of society, just as the Arts Councils were in 1947, or we can put our heads between our legs right now and kiss our ass goodbye.

If we really are as necessary to society as we like to think we are, we’d better start making the regional, social and national case for ourselves now. Or reconcile ourselves to a future entirely consisting of posting stuff on YouTube. And longing for a gig on Shaftesbury Avenue.