In March, the first phase of the theatre world's reaction to the lockdown was to hastily adapt shows for digital streaming, mostly by filming postponed work for home watching or continuing production on video-calling platforms. The National Youth Theatre’s Tiny Dancers was quickly repurposed for Zoom; BBC Radio’s Lockdown Theatre Festival salvaged interrupted plays from the Lyric Hammersmith, Royal Court and others.
As the probable duration of theatres’ closure became clear in April, the next idea was to dig into the archives: the National Theatre created NT at Home, where, for 16 weeks, a different video-recorded play was made available for online streaming, including past work from the Nottingham Playhouse and Young Vic. Bard-starved theatregoers could watch recordings of nine Shakespeare plays—mostly Royal Shakespeare Company performances—as part of the BBC Arts’ Culture in Quarantine series.
Having achieved their twin aims of alleviating boredom and ensuring that the public didn’t forget that theatre existed, these summer series have now ended. The reasons for this are simple: offering old videoed performances free-of-charge is not financially sustainable, and continuing to do so creates the impression that venues have no strategy for the future. Theatres in London and New York are now in a kind of limbo—caught between planning to reopen postponed plays from this year, and thinking ahead to how the 2021 season can respond to the times.
Larger institutions like the National Theatre are in a relatively strong position, argues Neelay Patel, CEO of Digital Theatre, an on-demand platform for the performing arts. “Most theatres don’t have a library of digitised content,” he explains, “certainly not to the creative standards that they would expect or want their audiences to experience—it’s normally archival material.” With audiences increasingly accustomed to the polish and choice available on Netflix and other services, the few theatres that are able to repackage recorded material cannot charge for them beyond a basic donation model (NT at Home was free, with suggested donations of £10 or £20).
The high cost of capturing and editing new work further solidifies this hierarchy of venues. In June, Claire Foy and Matt Smith reperformed a socially distanced version of their 2019 play Lungs to an empty auditorium at the Old Vic. 1,000 tickets were made available to watch the live stream, with audiences asked to contribute between £10-65 to keep the venue alive. As with Ralph Fiennes’ performance of David Hare’s new Covid-19 monologue Beat the Devil at the Bridge Theatre, hiring blockbuster actors is an essential component in tying theatres over until audiences return at capacity. Again, only certain institutions have the infrastructure to adapt
Some have concluded that to make digital content attractive, its formal challenges have to be embraced. Over lockdown, New York’s Public Theatre commissioned The Line, a documentary-style play focusing on the experiences of the city’s front line medical workers, for an eight-week run on the theatre’s YouTube channel. Written for a socially distanced, rather than live-rehearsing cast, the show avoided the pitfalls of streamed stage shows, which often appear hollow and underpowered when filmed. “We have tried to only present work that is created for the medium that it’s shown in, rather than streaming or showing filmed versions of stage shows,” says Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. The Public then moved to radio, hosting a serialised broadcast of Richard II in July. The series was adapted with earphones, laptop and phone screens in mind: “They’re not second hand or diminished experiences.” says Eustis. It’s always preferable for people to see the artwork itself, not a representation of the artwork.”
Although it is impossible to predict exactly how playwriting will be shaped by the pandemic, recent trends do give us some indicators, says Dan Rebellato, professor of modern theatre at the University of London. Venues including the National Theatre of Scotland and the Old Vic have been commissioning monologues for the safety and cost benefits, but also, Rebellato believes, to “return to something very primal and fundamental about theatre: gathering people together and telling a story in a way which is more about feeling than fiction.”
Hare’s play dealt with his own experience of Covid-19, but British theatre typically favours an allusive, indirect approach to real-world crises. The success of James Graham’s This House (2012)—about the lead up to the 1979 vote of no confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan—and Sam Mendes’ adaptation of the banking saga The Lehman Trilogy (2018) relied upon a significant historical distance to events. With Covid-19, there are many chapters of reality yet to be written.
Plays dealing with the pandemic in close detail may emerge in years to come, but not immediately. “This century, British new writing has thought: what is the form of a play that is appropriate to this world?” explains Rebellato. “Playwrights will be asking: what is a pandemic play structure? And what are the allegorical frameworks that don’t mention the pandemic, but which audiences will all recognise as tied to it?”
At Theatre503, a small south London venue with a focus on new writing, artistic director Lisa Spirling and her team have spent the past seven months reading 1700 scripts for their annual playwriting award. The independent venue serves as a springboard for early career writers, many of whom go on to receive mentorship in larger venues like the Royal Court. Although a relatively small employer, their contribution is vital to theatre’s grassroots ecosystem. “So many of the plays that we read are creating a new theatrical world,” says Spirling, who favours quest-style narratives and formal innovation in new work.“They’re rooted in something naturalistic, but then move into their own time, space, and moment.”
Many young writers begin their careers with heavier, more serious themes and then move towards comedy later on, Spirling says, but the pandemic may accelerate this creative trend. “I don’t necessarily think that earnest works particularly well on stage,” she says, anticipating joyful, exuberant work, mirroring the post-WWII popularity of vibrant set-piece musicals.
There are also plays written before the pandemic which will acquire a renewed relevance in its aftermath. Rebellato uses Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away as an example. The dystopian drama imagines a world in which nature involves itself in human warfare, with immense consequences. After initial criticisms of its cryptic nature, the play gained a newfound lucidity after 9/11, and was then seen as a classic commentary on the war on terror and the “weird fragmentation of the world,” says Rebellato.
Our current fracturing may suit more politically explicit work. Theatre503’s postponed 2020 programme featured Mathilde Dratwa’s Milk and Gall—about the experience of motherhood in Donald Trump’s America—and Before Evening Comes by Philana Imade Omorotionmwan, a dystopian play examining racism and the physical maiming of black Americans, conceived long before Black Lives Matter. Spirling insists that great work is anticipatory, creating its own fortuitous relevance in whichever world is it comes into. Meanwhile, modernist classics are ever-present as theatres reopen, their ability to speak back to us undiminished after decades: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Harold Pinter’s Betrayalhave recently played in Leeds and Bath respectively, favoured for their existentialist themes and potential for low-cast, bare stagings.
Eustis describes the “intersecting crises: health, economic, racial and political” which theatre will somehow have to capture moving forwards. “When we return, it’s going to be demanded of us that we prove that we matter right away,” he says. Like many off-Broadway producers, he’s putting his faith in a new generation of young black writers who are both politically radical and formally experimental, such as Jackie Sibblies Drury and Aleshea Harris. “The desire to reimagine what the theatrical event is, is very powerful, and I think is going to be more so when we return,” he says. “We will have to create opportunities for joy and a collective reaffirmation of our identity: a world of big themes; big ideas; and real ambition.”
As the probable duration of theatres’ closure became clear in April, the next idea was to dig into the archives: the National Theatre created NT at Home, where, for 16 weeks, a different video-recorded play was made available for online streaming, including past work from the Nottingham Playhouse and Young Vic. Bard-starved theatregoers could watch recordings of nine Shakespeare plays—mostly Royal Shakespeare Company performances—as part of the BBC Arts’ Culture in Quarantine series.
Having achieved their twin aims of alleviating boredom and ensuring that the public didn’t forget that theatre existed, these summer series have now ended. The reasons for this are simple: offering old videoed performances free-of-charge is not financially sustainable, and continuing to do so creates the impression that venues have no strategy for the future. Theatres in London and New York are now in a kind of limbo—caught between planning to reopen postponed plays from this year, and thinking ahead to how the 2021 season can respond to the times.
Larger institutions like the National Theatre are in a relatively strong position, argues Neelay Patel, CEO of Digital Theatre, an on-demand platform for the performing arts. “Most theatres don’t have a library of digitised content,” he explains, “certainly not to the creative standards that they would expect or want their audiences to experience—it’s normally archival material.” With audiences increasingly accustomed to the polish and choice available on Netflix and other services, the few theatres that are able to repackage recorded material cannot charge for them beyond a basic donation model (NT at Home was free, with suggested donations of £10 or £20).
The high cost of capturing and editing new work further solidifies this hierarchy of venues. In June, Claire Foy and Matt Smith reperformed a socially distanced version of their 2019 play Lungs to an empty auditorium at the Old Vic. 1,000 tickets were made available to watch the live stream, with audiences asked to contribute between £10-65 to keep the venue alive. As with Ralph Fiennes’ performance of David Hare’s new Covid-19 monologue Beat the Devil at the Bridge Theatre, hiring blockbuster actors is an essential component in tying theatres over until audiences return at capacity. Again, only certain institutions have the infrastructure to adapt
Some have concluded that to make digital content attractive, its formal challenges have to be embraced. Over lockdown, New York’s Public Theatre commissioned The Line, a documentary-style play focusing on the experiences of the city’s front line medical workers, for an eight-week run on the theatre’s YouTube channel. Written for a socially distanced, rather than live-rehearsing cast, the show avoided the pitfalls of streamed stage shows, which often appear hollow and underpowered when filmed. “We have tried to only present work that is created for the medium that it’s shown in, rather than streaming or showing filmed versions of stage shows,” says Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. The Public then moved to radio, hosting a serialised broadcast of Richard II in July. The series was adapted with earphones, laptop and phone screens in mind: “They’re not second hand or diminished experiences.” says Eustis. It’s always preferable for people to see the artwork itself, not a representation of the artwork.”
Although it is impossible to predict exactly how playwriting will be shaped by the pandemic, recent trends do give us some indicators, says Dan Rebellato, professor of modern theatre at the University of London. Venues including the National Theatre of Scotland and the Old Vic have been commissioning monologues for the safety and cost benefits, but also, Rebellato believes, to “return to something very primal and fundamental about theatre: gathering people together and telling a story in a way which is more about feeling than fiction.”
Hare’s play dealt with his own experience of Covid-19, but British theatre typically favours an allusive, indirect approach to real-world crises. The success of James Graham’s This House (2012)—about the lead up to the 1979 vote of no confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan—and Sam Mendes’ adaptation of the banking saga The Lehman Trilogy (2018) relied upon a significant historical distance to events. With Covid-19, there are many chapters of reality yet to be written.
Plays dealing with the pandemic in close detail may emerge in years to come, but not immediately. “This century, British new writing has thought: what is the form of a play that is appropriate to this world?” explains Rebellato. “Playwrights will be asking: what is a pandemic play structure? And what are the allegorical frameworks that don’t mention the pandemic, but which audiences will all recognise as tied to it?”
At Theatre503, a small south London venue with a focus on new writing, artistic director Lisa Spirling and her team have spent the past seven months reading 1700 scripts for their annual playwriting award. The independent venue serves as a springboard for early career writers, many of whom go on to receive mentorship in larger venues like the Royal Court. Although a relatively small employer, their contribution is vital to theatre’s grassroots ecosystem. “So many of the plays that we read are creating a new theatrical world,” says Spirling, who favours quest-style narratives and formal innovation in new work.“They’re rooted in something naturalistic, but then move into their own time, space, and moment.”
Many young writers begin their careers with heavier, more serious themes and then move towards comedy later on, Spirling says, but the pandemic may accelerate this creative trend. “I don’t necessarily think that earnest works particularly well on stage,” she says, anticipating joyful, exuberant work, mirroring the post-WWII popularity of vibrant set-piece musicals.
There are also plays written before the pandemic which will acquire a renewed relevance in its aftermath. Rebellato uses Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away as an example. The dystopian drama imagines a world in which nature involves itself in human warfare, with immense consequences. After initial criticisms of its cryptic nature, the play gained a newfound lucidity after 9/11, and was then seen as a classic commentary on the war on terror and the “weird fragmentation of the world,” says Rebellato.
Our current fracturing may suit more politically explicit work. Theatre503’s postponed 2020 programme featured Mathilde Dratwa’s Milk and Gall—about the experience of motherhood in Donald Trump’s America—and Before Evening Comes by Philana Imade Omorotionmwan, a dystopian play examining racism and the physical maiming of black Americans, conceived long before Black Lives Matter. Spirling insists that great work is anticipatory, creating its own fortuitous relevance in whichever world is it comes into. Meanwhile, modernist classics are ever-present as theatres reopen, their ability to speak back to us undiminished after decades: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Harold Pinter’s Betrayalhave recently played in Leeds and Bath respectively, favoured for their existentialist themes and potential for low-cast, bare stagings.
Eustis describes the “intersecting crises: health, economic, racial and political” which theatre will somehow have to capture moving forwards. “When we return, it’s going to be demanded of us that we prove that we matter right away,” he says. Like many off-Broadway producers, he’s putting his faith in a new generation of young black writers who are both politically radical and formally experimental, such as Jackie Sibblies Drury and Aleshea Harris. “The desire to reimagine what the theatrical event is, is very powerful, and I think is going to be more so when we return,” he says. “We will have to create opportunities for joy and a collective reaffirmation of our identity: a world of big themes; big ideas; and real ambition.”
