Plays in the Time of Corona - Some Reflections and a Possible Framework For Discussion of How We Might Think About Theatre While Theatres Are All Shut

I’m one of the lucky ones.  I have got an active commission for a script, even if I and the producers have no real idea when if or how any production based on this script can be contemplated. I can work at home, like I usually do.  Nonetheless, working with NTS, the Scotsman and Pitlochry Festival Theatre etc on the wee emergency bits we can currently produce for online and TV broadcast recently has got me thinking that it is incumbent on me, as a freelancer in this wonderful business we call “show”, to attempt to intrude upon conversations that I am sure are already happening within and between organisations.

To wit…after the “critical” phase of shutdown in response to the pandemic, what happens next in Scottish Theatre?  I know that these conversations are happening in London.  I am unaware of similar coordination here.  I am more than happy to be told that thinking is already collectively well advanced.  I merely want to point out that nothing any institutions or organizations come up with that does not take the freelancers and, most importantly, audiences along with them, are unlikely to be effective.

It is of course more than possible that dramatic production, whether for stage, screen and radio is effectively not going to happen at all if and until there is an effective vaccination programme, and that our future planning, personally, organizational and collective, has to face that distinct possibility. If this is to be the case, then we will need to look at governmental and sectorial choices predicated on there being SOMETHING we can do somewhere down the line in whatever circumstances are allowed us by the circumscriptions of whatever the vaunted “New Normal” turns out to look like.

While there is a certain comfort in throwing a duvet over our heads until someone comes to makes us all better, I would argue that we need to respond to our circumstances publically and collectively in a coordinated way so that audiences, artists producers and governments ALL come to a shared understanding and consensus of what a total shutdown in new dramatic production across all media means, and what baby steps we need to take us through the next period…possibly quite a LONG period...to reach whatever the “new normal” turns out to be.

This is urgently the case if the path we choose is one of a tentative and gradual lifting of emergency lockdown.  It has to be said that there is an emerging management consensus within Scottish Theatre that we should declare a uniform shutdown right now, probably until the New Year…and await developments. I am not sure that’s right.  I’m not sure that’s sustainable or practical.  I’m not sure that there is going to EVER be a vaccine universally available or we are going to reach the dreaded “herd immunity” without one for a good deal longer than that.

I think we might have to progressively re-invent the entire economy and cultural/political justification of Scottish Theatre.  And I think its touch and go whether we can do that or not. This is, I feel, the critical phase in this pandemic in which we find out.

In any case, being neither a doctor not a prophet, I am writing this letter openly because I believe whatever approach we adopt in the short, medium and long terms will need agreed and understood guidelines…and that these guidelines and parameters once again require a coordinated strategic understanding, at least, of what’s involved.  And that the basis of this understanding is that it is MOST likely that a staged and cautious lifting of lockdown conditions for drama production and attendance need to be planned for in the various stages that will almost certainly FOLLOW current emergency conditions but which will NOT be a restoration of the status quo, either now, six months from now or a year from now.

It seems certain that at the very least that drama production on stage and screen is going to be circumscribed for some time. Minimal cast, crew, locations...and theatres and TV studios operating, if at all, at very reduced capacity. We need to examine and agree those terms with unions, funders…insurers…and freelancers …as well as managements.

Up till now, in the “emergency” and "critical" phases of this epidemic, it seems to me that we in the "business" have been limited, more or less, to waving frantically to assert that we still exist. But I think we are increasingly aware that we will need to have strategies for the "convalescent" and "recuperation" phases too...and that we're not going to "get back to a fully healthy normality" any time soon. Indeed, it may well be that what we mean by "normality" will be something very different from the situation six weeks ago...and that right now we have no way of reliably predicting what "the new normal" will look like. But it will be upon us before we know it.

If we are going to have a chance to shape whatever happens THEN, we need to find the people NOW with the imagination and honest grit to think about what convalescence and recuperation might look like in terms of performance, live and broadcast. I think we need to find and recruit people in broadcasting as well as theatre.
  

I think the Scottish government are going to have to be involved in making any economic modelling beyond the “critical” phase of furlough and grants to the self-employed etc.  I am among those waiting with bated breath for what HMRC come up with in the SHORT term for the self-employed. But what I am also doing, among other things, is making my own isolated theoretical stab at thinking about what comes next for the public facing industry I work in.  And I want to see who is out there to talk to about getting practical.

I realise that the shell shock of the first critical stage of the pandemic is still with us, but I do think we need to get a bit strategic as well as to think about how to look after ourselves in the convalescent and recuperation phases too…we cannot simply WAIT for the new normal to come along.  We need, however clumsily, to try to shape it by how we handle what comes before it. What I'm talking about applies to me, of course.  But it ALSO applies across the board to production companies, and agencies as well as “freelancers.”  Current emergency measures will not and cannot last forever.  We need to look at what happens next.

What I am saying is as true of the tourist industry, for example.  Bars, restaurants, clubs, museums etc etc etc. Conversations will be had and are being had about all of these. I think it likely that the more public those conversations are the more likely they are to find support in institutions and local and national government, as well as, in our case, with the public who come who came and watched the shows once upon a time, and paid their taxes to make the shows happen.

This is why I’m sending this out to folk I know now.  And will be looking to find a way of publishing it shortly. It might well be that we’re just shut, not just for weeks or month, but for years.  But I think that is a counsel of despair and I hope we can do better and we should ACT, at this moment, AS IF WE HAD FAITH that we can do something now, and in the medium term…to prepare for the long term.  This, in rough draft, is what I have tried to set out below.

Quick note: I say “we” quite a lot in what follows.  What I mean by “we” is those who want a future for publically supported theatre (and broadcast) making in Scotland.  That this “we” matters at all culturally, let alone politically and socially, is the most flimsily imaginable working hypothesis.

Meanwhile…

Illness is our guiding reality at this moment. So I am going to borrow its categories for a first attempt at prognosis for theatre…and performed drama…in Scotland in the wake of the continuing pandemic. I’m going to start by using this framework to think about where we’ve been and where we are…and then where we might go next.

First Stage – Emergency

The social and political priority at this stage is to protect the health service from being overwhelmed. Everything else is subordinated to this aim and can wait to even be thought about.  Hence the economy, including, of course, theatre, TV and radio drama production, abruptly stops. And our government, temporarily, and only because, for the moment, this is a rich country, plug the gaps…and put everything in deep freeze.
 

But everything is frozen as it was.  The health and basic supply “functions” of our society are kept going, but we ACT AS IF the rest of the life that we knew until six weeks ago can simply be restarted as if the pandemic would be “over” before we knew it…as if there were such a thing as “over”…and as if a return to “the old normal” was possible.

But it isn’t going to be like that, and the more used to emergency conditions we get, the more we come to understand that we are going to go through a whole SERIES of crises …that each of what I have called “the stages of recovery” is ITSELF a crisis where everything we used to take for granted about how we did everything has to get reinvented.

ALL of the government’s loan and furlough schemes, for example, presently scheduled to take us till the end of June, are likewise predicated upon a return to the world of the beginning of March.  As if that were what’s going to happen when the “lockdown is over.”

It isn’t. And we know by now it isn’t…which indicates that we are moving into the next stage…which is, in every sense of the word, the “critical” one.

For theatre in Scotland, our first response to the emergency was to wave and shout that we weren’t out of our depth, that we could cope…but all of it was waving with a deep fear that we were actually drowning. There are companies and institutions already going to the wall.  Ironically, the more reliant on Box Office they are, and hence often the more popular, the worse they are getting hit.

Meanwhile, the NTS, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and the Scotsman newspaper have all, in various ways, insisted on “aliveness” as our Facebook Status. The Scenes for Survival, PFT’s reaching out to its audience by phone and to writers by way of mini-commissions, and Joyce MacMillan’s efforts at the Scotsman website, at a limited “substitution” for small scale work (like the tour of my own “Signalman” play with Tom McGovern that was supposed to be happening now) are all basically gestures towards survival as a wish, rather than strategies towards securing it.

This is not to knock any of these organisations and initiatives. I have happily and enthusiastically contributed to all three initiatives. And there are probably things going on that I don’t know about…But we should not mistake any of them for being more than what they are.

What we decide, what we argue about in the NEXT phase, is going to be decisive.

Second Stage – Critical

This is where I think we are now. Key industries only are being opened or are about to be opened piecemeal. Precautionary lockdown and social distancing measures effectively remain in place.  We are glancing very uneasily at the finances of what happens next…and theatres and broadcasters are no different from everybody else. Except that we are uncomfortably aware, and must now openly face and acknowledge, that like tourism, the bars and hotels and restaurants, our business only exists through discretionary spending, not as a necessity…and there are huge, ungainly questions that no one quite dares ask yet about what we do next.
 

And make no mistake, the same basic questions are going to be asked right across society.  What really matters? What are the values upon which we can take agreed, necessarily political choices as to how we try to attain the “new normality” where we will inevitably arrive, now that the Old Normality is a train that has definitively left the station and disappeared round a bend.

The thing about being in the critical phase of an illness, is that you might THINK that you’re okay.  But actually, you could still die at any minute. Even now that the NHS has been saved from immediate calamity, It will STILL take a value driven policy decision to decide our individual fates…whether you get onto a ventilator or not…and the way in which Scottish Theatre proves that it deserves saving can only be by thinking very, very clearly about what comes next…in the CONVALESCNCE and RECOVERY stages that will come before, finally, the “new normality.”

Make no mistake, in order to influence that normality, however long it takes to arrive…six months, a year, two years…is not just going to be decided by, say, the timetable for the availability of a vaccine or effective treatments (there is no vaccine for AIDS…which was the last “plague” to hit showbiz this hard) and is going to be determined by how we act right now.

Now that we have checked that we are still breathing, we are starting to look around at each other in the shared understanding that our future can be measured exactly by how immediately and urgently we screw on our thinking caps right now about what we think those next stages will be like… and if we are to EARN our survival at all.

My instinct, I think widely shared, is that if we simply “leave it to the market”…or pull the duvet over our heads and wait for whatever comes to get us…to use the model of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we are going to find that Bedford Falls has come under new ownership and is to be re-named Pottersville. Even forgetting the lovey’s film reference, those with the deepest pockets and the smallest consciences will control everything even more completely than they do now as small businesses go to the wall, as mass unemployment cripples trade unions even further and standards of safety and hygiene are jettisoned along with any last symbolic attempts to arrest climate change.

That is a path we could take, but I don’t think Trump World is a real option for the future. I think it will ensure that this future is nasty, brutish and short. I think it is decisions we make now, made in this second, critical phase of the pandemic that will shape our recovery, should we be fortunate enough to make one, in a progressive…or at least not too painfully REGRESSIVE, a direction.

If this is true of society as a whole, it is VERY true of Scottish Theatre as a microcosm. If we are EVER AGAIN looking to have our public spaces open to as big an audience as we can get, with that audience happy to come to mass events where they are going to hear someone coughing two rows behind them and not think about leaving immediately…at ANY point in the future, I think we have to DECIDE TO SURVIVE and to make concrete plans right now for what we do next.

INTERLUDE – a putative timeline

This timeline is necessarily contingent. Of course it is. But I think we need to put rough estimates in place, based on the dribs and drabs of information and rumour available to us, in order to think realistically about keeping our “performance culture” alive. The periods also, of course, overlap as well as being only guesses. These are where we’ve been and where we are, as explored above:.

I am suggesting that there are three “stages” or “phases” of what comes next…with no firm predictions as to their duration, but some indications as to their nature. Here they are with a tentative timeline which may be realistic, pessimistic...or optimistic.  Your temperament may well determine your response. I briefly reiterate the two first stages before moving on to numbers three and four.

EMERGENCY – March to May 2020.

 “Stay at Home and Save the NHS.”

Emergency is what we’ve just been through.  But it’s basically deep freeze followed by an understanding that we can’t stay frozen forever…and that the rules of the game have changed forever.

CRITICAL May to August 2020.

The question everyone in the whole country is asking is basically this : “How do we stay alive under severe mandatory restrictions WITHOUT necessarily the same level of direct government economic support to employees, including the self-employed, now that “the lockdown has been lifted” but that many kinds of work and economic activity remain impossible.“

I can’t pretend I know what the answer is, but I do know this is the time for a prognosis and a suggested plan of treatment.  I think we have to face reality.  And that the reality is that we simply cannot WAIT for a vaccine or a miracle. We are passing through one crisis into another crisis…and there are least two crises still to come.

CONVALESCENCE (August 2020 – April 2021?)

“Convalescence” as a medical concept involves an “imitation of life.”  It means flexing your muscles so they don’t atrophy because you CAN’T do the real thing for a while. In this particular instance, it means theatre people doing what they can do to work their creative muscles…but that ISN’T theatre…but hopefully doing some work that is valuable in itself and will put us in a good place to do what comes next.

The basic assumption I’m working from is that nothing resembling theatre as we’ve known it is economically possible or plannable for a considerable period to come. And that it will be some time after THAT that we start getting audiences who are comfortable to come back…if they do…and perhaps initially under circumstances of “social distancing” which are hard to envision when one thinks of those dear distant days of a few weeks ago crowding the bar at the Traverse or the Tron.

(I have heard talk of opening for Christmas…and that MIGHT be possible…but the economics of running a Christmas show on a box office capacity of a socially distanced 25% (for example) don’t merit more than a cursory glance. The logistics of schools going back will likely preclude block bookings…etc etc etc)

So in the immediate future…maybe for six months, maybe for a year…our choices range between a bottle of whisky and a duvet on the one hand…or making some kind of plan on the other, however tentative.

And that means, in this case, using theatrical skills to make material of BROADCAST quality and potential to be shown online and/or broadcast.  It probably means work featuring small or even very small casts.  But it should be substantial in terms of content, challenging, niche…possibly elitist…and, in broadcast terms, extremely CHEAP but nonetheless do things to a broadcast quality for showing on TV or online that exploit the strengths that WE have that standard TV production doesn’t.

In terms of what that might be, as a playwright, of course I have some ideas. Scottish Theatre has a deep talent pool of designers, directors and builders as well as actors…and it should not be beyond the wit of ANY of them to be producing new work (or imagnatively and excitingly recycled OLD work) under these challenging circumstances. All we need, I suggest, is broadcasters willing to take it on, and that means producers, TV and Theatre producers, who are willing to take a punt on it…and funders and sponsors willing to back it.

This in turn means institutional backing…from government, from broadcast management, from institutions like Creative Scotland…but it is hardly rocket science. If I can see how it might be possible to produce work of genuine quality that would be an exciting and challenging experience to watch…even if it isn’t theatre and cannot aspire to be theatre, even if it’s a whole new art form, and if I find the prospect exciting rather than daunting…then the same is surely true for my colleagues and for a wider audience of which, after all, I am a member. I am not interested in making anything in the theatre or on any other medium anywhere I don’t want to watch.

I think we should be getting designers and scenic artists and lighting teams to create sets for extraordinary individual performances of extraordinary and substantial work that is tailor made for what we might call “guerrilla” studio production. I think we should be thinking of each of these shows as unapologetic low budget films for immediate broadcast.  Monologues spring to mind, of course, but so do small scale plays.

We need to take over a space…or spaces…theatrical or otherwise…and make ourselves a place where we can write and direct and design and act without ANY sense that this is an apology or second best.  Rather, that this is a dramatic form especially invented and curated for the express purpose of keeping our creative talents limber.

The real test, of course, is whether or not we might want to keep this kind of broadcast/online production going AFTER the pandemic does finally, definitively ease.  That it’s not just a substitute, not second best, but a new, evolved dramatic form…the TV studio play reinvented for the 2020s…

The rule of thumb, as with all that I’m suggesting for this “stage” and the next…is that if we don’t think we should do it when it’s NOT an emergency, we maybe shouldn’t do it at all.

But in the meantime, if we can invent a new form that might actually survive, we should absolutely go for it while we can.

And to do that, I think we need to pool resources as a whole, collectively.  That “we” I’ve been using is possibly rhetorical.  But I honestly believe that if we don’t want to all hang separately, it is imperative that we hang together…and that we take a deep breath and accept that this means leadership, collective and consensual if at all possible, but essential without peradventure.

There are also already instances of theatre spaces being used not with the aim of a full house at 7.30pm , but as spaces where you can welcome a rotation of smaller audiences (maybe fifty in a space which normally seats three hundred) for maybe 30 minutes at a time to a space that’s open all day…for exhibitions, installations, maybe even short performances…all in spaces that can be made all the more extraordinary in lighting and design BECAUSE they’re not full!  Numbers can be limited on and off stage and the safety of this new form can be advertised. 

The theatre is a public space where art is made before your eyes…and there is no real reason why that has to mean cramming in 600 folk at 7.30pm…when you might pull in the same crowd over a twelve hour period.

A group of designers convened by Tom Piper is already working on an idea like this.

RECOVERY (April 2021-April 2022?)

Proceeding with the necessary caveat that the further we get away in time, the mistier is our crystal ball, if and when we do open our theatres…or however many of them are left, it is likely to be for a restricted audience and with restricted resources for putting stuff on, we will need the same collegiate or collective consciousness mandated and supported politically and institutionally as we move from convalescence to recovery.  Again, in medical terms, the recovery phase is when you start to do the things you used to do, and possibly go through the learning process of doing them differently from the way you did before. My instinct is once again, towards a collective value driven approach.  

Which requires, among other things, some agreement as to what those values are or might be. Hence talking about it now, once again.

Anyway, I think we should treat this period, (which I suppose MIGHT be coming as soon as Christmas…if the epidemic doesn’t flare up again…although I doubt it) as one for experimentation…because we sure as hell won’t be making any money.

But if and when it does come, like the “convalescent” stage before it, there are two essential pre-conditions, two sets of criteria.

First, it has to be “good,” not just “good, considering.”  And second, it will need a different financial structure to what is asked even now of theatres like the Lyceum and Dundee Rep. Indeed, as I observed previously, it is exactly those companies who have followed recent funders’ injunctions to be more reliant on box office and sponsorship, the most successful venues by those criteria…who are in the most trouble now.

This of course is leading us towards the even murkier mists of defining now in these early days of the crisis what the “new normal” (with or without an active virus) is going to look like aesthetically and economically.

I would argue that it is still worth looking now at what an “interim” theatre …or “live performance culture” might look like…on the assumption that social distancing will still apply on stage, as well as back stage and in the auditorium.

What kind of public space we’re talking about and with how many people in it, what time or times of day…these are the logistical parameters within which we can present…well…present what?

There is an impulse, of course, to put on in 2021 what was supposed to go on in 2020.  This is both honourable and laudable…but it may not at ALL be practical. It may represent a wish for normality more than it does a practical forward facing plan.  And normality left the station six weeks ago and has since disappeared round a bend in the rail track, I suspect never to be seen again.  At least it seems very unsafe to simply assume that this is a hiatus after which everything will resume exactly as it did before.

I think that the theatre that we find and invent to work for our audiences under the new set of circumstances will be the theatre through which those audiences regain the theatre going habit, if they ever do.

And what kind of shows will go on?  What will be popular and cheap and easy to produce? Perhaps in unconventional spaces?  Perhaps in a year’s time. And perhaps for another year?

I think we need to talk about it.  I think designer, writers and actors have to day dream a little.  But we will also need to deliver something which our funders think it is essential we produce.  I think it will involve much more education and outreach.  I think it may involve new media…and I think may be being performed for an audience who are economically as well as socially challenged by what is happening to all of us.

The live theatre, live storytelling…these arts will have to prove themselves and earn their corn and their place to eat it.  I don’t think it’s rocket science.  I think we can do it. But we need to be planning it now and setting up the political and institutional networks of support to enable it.

The New Normal April 2022 – whenever.

On a personal note, the “New Normality” on this schema corresponds to my sixtieth birthday. I should face the distinct possibility that I have already retired, but will act, for the moment, as if I’m going to live forever.

On the same theme, if he have to do some necessary dreaming about the immediate, short and medium terms of our stages of recovery, perhaps when it comes to the new normal, delivering world class live performance and storytelling to the full social and geographical range of the people who live in this country…and beyond, telling our stories to the world…maybe “effective dreaming” is where we can afford to be for a little longer.  I think I know some of the features of the “new normality” I’d like to see. I think it would involve regional hubs in our towns and cities.  I think it would involve a regular and reliable touring circuit. I think it would have a regulated proportion of the cake available to the new and untried and the risky as well as a far more flexible responsiveness to audiences than seems available to us now in the era of the well filled form as the highest and most useful form of “story telling.”

But maybe that really is a conversation for another day.  Except to say, on the one hand, that is precisely the values of that “Scottish Theatre that is yet to be” that will get us through the accidents and alarms of the next couple of years, and that the brutal truth of this epidemic and its economics are that not everything or everyone is going to come through it in exactly the same shape. That there are going to be job losses, and fights…and blood on the carpet.  There is a job to do with our cultural and political infrastructure before we can even BEGIN to day dream effectively.

None of it means we shouldn’t make a start.  And, literally, there is NO time…there will never BE a time…like the present.