Coronavirus in Scotland - Joyce McMillan on the day the curtain fell on Scottish theatre

For theatre in Scotland, Monday was the day the curtain fell and the lights began to fade, for the next few months at least. The decisive moment came with the Prime Minister’s warning, at his morning press briefing, that people should avoid gatherings and crowded places, such as “pubs, clubs and theatres.” Although the UK government did not implement the kind of ban imposed in other European countries, and left the legal and financial responsibility for closure entirely with individual organisations, his advice put theatres – along with restaurants, bars, and venues of all kinds – in an increasingly impossible position; and by lunchtime, Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres trust, which operates the 1,300-seat King’s Theatre in Leven Street and the 1,800-seat Festival Theatre, had announced its closure until 30 April, to be reviewed in a few weeks’ time.

In the afternoon, the UK-wide theatre giant Ambassadors Theatre Group, which operates the King’s Theatre and Theatre Royal in Glasgow, as well as the giant 3,000-seat Playhouse in Edinburgh, also announced an immediate closure. Aberdeen Performing Arts – which operates Aberdeen Concert Hall and His Majesty’s Theatre – followed in short order; then, one by one, the producing theatres that have gradually transformed Scotland’s theatre life over the last 70 years.

Pitlochry Festival Theatre went first, on Monday afternoon, cancelling all further performances of Barefoot In The Park, starring Clare Grogan. The Lyceum followed suit on Tuesday morning, cancelling all remaining performances of Mrs Puntila And Her Man Matti, starring Elaine C Smith. Dundee Rep and the Tron Theatre in Glasgow also announced their closure until further notice; and the “without walls” National Theatre of Scotland, which is about to open two major productions, announced that regardless of what happens over the next few months, they will pay in full all freelance artists already contracted to NTS projects – a commitment, sadly, which many other companies may not be able to match. Even the mighty Edinburgh International Festival was forced to postpone this week’s launch of its 2020 programme; and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe announced contingency plans for a possible cancellation of the entire vast 2020 event.

To say that all this is unprecedented is an understatement. Within a week, the theatre and festivals landscape that has defined my 42-year working life as a theatre critic and commentator has vanished, or is on the brink of doing so; and not since the period of postwar recovery that saw the founding of the Arts Council, and of events like the Edinburgh International Festival, has its future seemed so precarious. For just as the coming of coronavirus has exposed weaknesses across our society – from the so-called “gig economy” to an underfunded NHS – so it also exposes just how vulnerable many of our arts institutions are, given what is now a decade of standstill funding for most of them; and how the freelance workforce on which most of their creative output depends, from writers and actors to technicians, may be decimated by a crisis on this scale.

“At the moment,” says the playwright David Greig, artistic director of the Lyceum in Edinburgh, “we simply have no idea how this will pan out. Our 2021 programme, for instance, set to be announced in a few weeks, has just effectively been torn to shreds, because we have no idea what financial position we will be in by next year, and the same goes for all our co-producing theatres, from Pitlochry to Southampton.”

In a cruel twist, too, the theatres which depend most heavily on box office and commercial income – notably Pitlochry Festival Theatre and the Lyceum, which both earn more than 80 per cent of their income from sources other than public subsidy – are the ones which will suffer most. “Theatre brings people together,” wrote Greig on Monday. “That is our moral and economic reason to exist, and this disease strikes at that simple impulse;” and it’s doubly ironic that alongside smaller companies like Vanishing Point or Theatre Gu Leor, who patiently piece together each precariously-funded project over a period of years, it’s the theatres that have recently succeeded best in building their audiences, and depending primarily on them, that now stand to suffer the greatest shock. Even commercial giants like Ambassadors Theatre Group, which produces little theatre in Scotland but is responsible for giant touring shows like Mamma Mia! and The Lion King, have no guarantee of surviving, in what will almost certainly be a much-changed cultural and economic landscape.

No cloud, though, is entirely without a silver lining; and Greig says he is already impressed and touched by the willingness of Scotland’s theatres – and particularly their executive directors, whom he describes as theatre’s unsung heroes – to work together, patiently and passionately, to try to deal with the current crisis.

“This is a totally new situation,”

says Greig, “and eventually we will have to approach Creative Scotland, and governments at all levels, to make the case for the support we’ll need – not just for the arts, of course, but for all the organisations and workers that are under threat, across so many sectors. It would be terrible if all the carefully built structures of Scottish theatre, put together over so many decades, were to be destroyed by this.

“What I’m sure of, though, is that Scotland’s theatre community can and will work together, and that when we talk to government, we will be trying to speak with one voice, and to support one another. We all know how interdependent we are, in creating a strong theatre life here in Scotland. And then of course, for artists, there’s the fact that every crisis is also an opportunity. It’s our job to respond to the changing world we live in; and although I have no idea yet how it will happen, we will be responding to this change too – and eventually bringing people together again, to try to understand it.”