The Effect of the Pandemic on Theatre

Challenge & Hope

Millie Thomas Isabel Pond

On March 16th, 2020, a week before lockdown in the UK began, theatres shut. The impact of this over the last year has been massive due to the size of the industry in the UK, employing 290,000 people and worth £1.28 billion. My aim for this article was to find out the impact of Covid-19 on people working in the performing arts, their experience of lockdown and how they think it will affect the industry in the future.

To help me with my investigation I interviewed: Amy Marston: an actor who has had roles in ‘The Hello Girls’ and ‘EastEnders’ (television), ‘The Christmas Prince’ (film), ‘Broken Glass’ and ‘Eurydice’ (stage). Liam Daly: a freelance Video and Lighting technician who has been working professionally for 3 years alongside doing a degree in Creative Lighting Control at Rose Bruford College. Chukwudi Iwuji: an Old Caterhamian who is now an actor, with leading roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre and on-screen roles in ‘The Split’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Madam Secretary’. Femi Elufowoju Jr: an actor and award-winning director, recently directing ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives’. He also played the role of ‘Pastor Joshua’ in the Netflix series ‘Sex Education’. The theatre industry could be viewed as a microcosm of the rest of the country throughout the pandemic, as people working in it experienced similar issues to everyone else, adapting to working online, being furloughed and struggling with adjusting to the new normal. However, these problems were perhaps magnified for them due to people’s passion for their work in the theatre industry which was something apparent in almost all of my interviews, with the sentiment “you don’t do it if you don’t love it” being echoed throughout. One of the first questions I asked in all my interviews was “What were you doing before the first lockdown?” in order to find out exactly what it was my interviewees ended up missing out on. Amy Marston described the rapid escalation of attitudes towards Covid in the UK saying: “We were all vaguely aware of this disease in China and I remember I’d done quite a few [castings] and…suddenly, they were starting to go ‘we’re not going to invest in any kind of production”. Meanwhile Liam Daly had to leave a production mid-way through technical rehearsals and Chukwudi Iwuji had a completely different experience altogether which he reflected on: “I was one of the lucky ones, I wasn’t doing a play. I know some people whose plays shut on their opening night on Broadway.” Femi Elufowoju Jr had just come to the end of a first leg of a tour and was entering a research phase for his new play ’54-60’, so was forced to fly home from central Africa at short notice. I was immediately struck by the variety of all these answers and how completely different each person’s experience was, which was something that I continued to notice throughout my interviews. Whilst uncertainty was one of the things I, and many other people, really struggled with during lockdown, it’s something that my interviewees were prepared for as they have experienced it throughout their careers. Marston told me that: “The industry quickly adjusted to this new normal which is zooming

and stuff…I did lots of online stuff, I got involved with readings and audio things, I did a…project making a film with a college to teach people editing...And I’ve had to learn how to coach on Teams and Zoom which has saved my bacon really”. Meanwhile Iwuji and Elufowoju both spent lockdown working on new and pre-existing projects. Iwuji reflected: “What happened…is that people who had a backlog of things they were developing or writing…could do that because they weren’t filming…so development of plays and screenplays really came to the foreground”. In contrast, as Daly was still completing his degree, he said that: “Lots of my time was taken up finishing my dissertation [at the beginning of lockdown]”. He then worked at the Cervantes Theatre from September to December on some short films which were “filmed in a day, edited over a week and then broadcast on a livestream the following week”. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing and Marston shared that: “at the moment it’s quite hard doing self-tape auditions [where] you send them off…and you often don’t hear at all unless you get the job, so it’s very hard to keep motivated”. Elufowoju explained some more downsides of lockdown to me saying: “Insecurity kicked in, selfesteem took a dent, and everything “What happened…is that came to a complete standstill…Being people who had a backlog of unable to function and fulfil your things they were developing purpose as a creative artist has been frustrating in every conceivable way”. or writing…could do that However, I was amazed by the because they weren’t filming… tiny proportion of negatives in my so development of plays and interviews compared with the massive screenplays really came to the amount of positivity, adaptability and hope. Whether it was spending foreground” Femi Elufowoju Jr time with family, not always worrying there’d be a last-minute audition or experiencing a shift in focus “on being ok with the things that really matter”, it became clear to me that people in the theatre industry had created positives out of the many negatives of the pandemic. Perhaps one of the biggest positives to come out of lockdown for the theatre industry is the change it has inspired. Daly told me that: “There’s a big push at the moment…to discuss things like working hours. And I wonder when we go back if there’ll be a kind of attitude of let’s do this right”. Daly and Iwuji also agreed that recordings of performances and online performances would continue to grow, with Iwuji pointing out the many benefits of this as it means “You can watch a play on Broadway in Iowa now”, making theatre much more accessible to everyone. After conducting my interviews, I feel I have found the answers to my questions. The immediate impact of the pandemic was felt very rapidly and throughout the industry. However, solutions have been found and the industry has adapted to these new and unforeseen challenges. There is every reason to hope theatre will be able to return to something close to ‘normal’ whilst incorporating these new lessons to strengthen it further. I know for me, this pandemic has only made my love for theatre stronger and I can’t wait to watch some amazing performances when theatres reopen.