Going to the theatre is its own small performance. A nice dress, a G&T in the bar, the anticipation of what the stage will hold. This used to make me anxious (Will I enjoy it? Will I enjoy it in the right way? Will I enjoy it to the value of £35?) until a friend explained the life-changing magic of leaving in the interval. And though I’ve never quite shaken the hope that a duff first half will turn into a magical second, this advice made me realise that I was under no obligation to be delighted.
The point is to be there, to see drama erupt in front of you, to feel whatever you feel — bored, irritated, hysterical, awed — because of what real, quick-pulsed, accident-prone people are doing in same room as you. This is why recorded or even streamed theatre has never seemed enticing to me. Why watch something on a screen that can only be a flattened version of the living play?
Then, the last time I went to the theatre — between the lockdowns, to see a revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Theatre Royal in Bath — it felt like a performance of a different sort. The temperature gun at the entrance. The nervous milling to avoid breaching social distancing. The smothering muzzle of my own warm breath trapped under a mask (which, as much as I accept the necessity, I’m never going to find pleasant). The emptiness of the place, with seats deliberately unbooked so we were all well-spaced.
As happy as I was to be back, it was inevitably strange. And the strangeness leaches from the audience to the stage. The audience, self-conscious about the whole business of being an audience, can’t play its part quite the way we should. There’s a bristle of tension in the room, but only partly directed at the business on-stage: however fraught the three-hander of adultery and deception is, it’s now in competition with the persistent worry that just being here might kill you. Up in the balcony, we fluffed a couple of our cues, coming in too late with the laughs the actors had earned, taking too long to share the ripple of emotion through our socially distanced seats.
Can theatre come back from Covid? Early on in lockdown, an acquaintance who works in theatre described his business — with surprising sanguinity — as doomed, given that it subsists on “old people sitting together in the dark”. The average age of a theatregoer is 52. The largest group is those aged 65-74. From a coronavirus point of view, it could only really be worse if the theatre held special sway with profound asthmatics. Then, to make your margins, you take that audience and stack it elbow-to-elbow, except you can’t do that anymore, so you find ways to eke those margins out.
That, presumably, is why the Theatre Royal chose its reopening season, which it billed as a run of “modern classics”. Betrayal, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, David Mamet’s Oleanna: all plays with recognisable names and bankable writers, but also, all plays with tiny casts and simple staging to keep costs down. Then the second lockdown came before Copenhagen could begin. As December looms, theatres are looking at missing out on the financially critical panto season. Many expect never to open again.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe