The future of the arts: ‘Online theatre is a skeleton of the thing itself’

With real life now the biggest show in town, our theatre critic reflects on the catastrophic effects of lockdown, and talks to industry insiders about navigating a way back * Kitty Empire: ‘No one has anything positive to say about physically distanced gigs. At all’ Not ill, bereaved or penniless. Although dependent for my living on the performing arts – a sector so savaged by lockdown that it is at risk of permanent mutilation – I have so far been fortunate. I am as yet physically unscathed. Merely topsy-turvy.  Lockdown made me see the point of Salvador Dalí’s melted clocks. I am in the same room as I was before the theatres went dark. Yet without the night job, boundaries quickly went woozy, with a disconcerting mixture of torpor and intensity. No theatre means no weekly deadlines and no limit to each day. No changing into critic’s clothes at 5pm, no setting off to work as my neighbours return home. It means not seeing those critical versions of office and colleagues: foyers and theatre bars and the well-known backs of reviewing necks. It means no automatic shift of gear in the evening: no being snatched away into a playwright’s mind; no being taken into a different space by a designer. It is as if part of the dreamscape had been stolen. Continue reading...
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