The show must go on

I am a bit of a lovey so as you can imagine, I’m missing theatre trips big time. Since lockdown started, I’m watching ‘Theatre at Home’ maybe once or twice a week but it just isn’t the same. How can a multi-dimensional and often visceral, experience play out even remotely the same from a flat, two-dimensional monitor in your own home? I can never get the sound loud enough and I find myself leaning into the screen, like I’m trying to breathe in the atmosphere. And watching alone is no fun either. No friends beside me, to jab in the ribs or to gasp or laugh with. I’ve tried watching performances accompanied by a glass of wine which is a slight improvement. Maybe I need to slosh the wine into a warm plastic beaker for the full effect.

Of course, my temporary personal deprivation worryingly acts out against the backcloth of threatened permanent closure of favourite venues including Shakespeare’s Globe and the Old Vic. Locally we worry about the Bush Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush, the Orange Tree at Richmond and the Lyric Hammersmith. It was good to read this week that the Government has set up a new ‘Cultural Renewal Taskforce’ to meet weekly, aimed at getting the cultural sector up and running in the real, rather than virtual, world.

Yet all this is nothing compared to the blow dealt by Covid19 to my friend’s daughter, an upcoming actor. She had just secured her first West End role, for which she had received glowing preview reviews, working alongside Jennifer Saunders, in Noel Coward’s ‘Blithe Spirit’. Just as it opened, it had to close again.  For her, and countless others in the theatre business, somehow the ‘show must go on’ but in what shape and form, we have yet to know.