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Theatre can thrive after lockdown Thanks to the plague, flexibility is baked into the industry's business model

Plague never stopped Shakespeare. Credit: IMDB

Plague never stopped Shakespeare. Credit: IMDB


March 18, 2021   5 mins

It was a year ago this week that Britain’s 250 theatres were shut, placing tens of thousands out of work and freezing the country’s cultural life indefinitely. Yet it’s not been the first lockdown that London’s theatre land has endured, and the lessons from the first great closure offer hope for an industry that suffered as much as any these past 12 months. Indeed, it could be said that lockdown helped shape our theatre.

Back in August 1592 plague had broken out in London and, fearing that plays might be super-spreader events, the city closed its playhouses, keeping them shut for two years.  It was not the first time: thirty years earlier, in 1564, the Lord Mayor had worried that “the great and frequent confluences, congregations and assemblies of great numbers and multitudes of people pressed together in small rooms” was a key factor in the spread of disease. The Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, wrote the same year that “there is no one thing” that “is more like to have renewed this contagion than the practice of an idle sort of people, common players, who now daily set up bills [adverts for performances], whereunto the youth resorteth excessively and there taketh infection”. As we all know, the authorities like to blame the young for spreading illness.

In times of disease, performances were often cancelled. “For the avoiding of Infection”, the Lord Mayor wrote in 1569, “all great resort, assembly, and concourse of people assembled and drawn together by reason of any plays, interludes or other shows should be forbidden”. Serious breakouts of plague, lasting several months, swept through London every few years between 1570 and 1583. But the theatre was never completely closed. By the end of this period, the Lord Mayor was writing, “one very great and dangerous inconvenience” was “the assembly of people to plays, to which do resort great multitudes of the basest sort of people, and many infected with sores running on them, which be otherwise perilous for contagion”.

For almost ten years after 1583, plague outbreaks had been more manageable. The 1592-94 pestilence was therefore a shock both in its suddenness and in its duration, and theatre people were of course not immune. Margaret Brayne was amongst those who died in this vicious resurgence of the disease — a woman who had helped to finance, build and run at least one of the earliest London playhouses, the Theatre. She may also have helped her husband John to build the oldest Elizabethan playhouse that we know of, the Red Lion, the pair helping to invent theatre as an architectural space.

But plague presented opportunities for those willing and able to pursue them. These were the years that Simon Forman started to build a public reputation by working as both doctor and magician in plague-stricken London districts. Through these early years of fame, Forman established a distinctively early modern reputation that spanned medicine, psychology, astrology and necromancy. He would later become much consulted by ordinary and famous Londoners, becoming an early modern celebrity.

Likewise, other professionals used this year as an opportunity to grow their profiles. The book publisher Joan Broome printed a play in 1592 and explained to her readers in a preface that “Since the plays in Paul’s were dissolved, there are certain comedies come to my hands by change”. In other words: the playhouse on London’s St Paul’s Cathedral site has now been closed, and I am therefore publishing some of its plays. Here a professional woman responds to closure by treating it as a business opportunity. Play publication increased widely in these years, and is a key reason why these texts survive today: in some ways we have plague, and the consequent theatre closures, to thank for the development and our knowledge of the period’s drama. And though we don’t know when Shakespeare’s writing career began, these were the years in which that writing started to make itself known, both onstage and in print.

But other Londoners found themselves utterly without work — and there was no furlough scheme in the 16th century. In 1593 the London watermen, who made money ferrying people across the Thames, petitioned the government for the reopening of the Rose playhouse in Southwark. These men depended on the audiences for much of their income: a reminder that it is not just the hospitality and entertainment industries that suffer at a time like this, but all those who enable the public to get out and about.

It’s worth remembering, here, that early modern playhouses were the product of an enormous rupture in society: the English Reformation. As Catholicism was cancelled, its religious spaces were confiscated by the state. Many of them became stages for a new kind of English theatre. The Theatre and the Curtain, for instance, were both built outside the London city walls in Shoreditch on former monastery land; in the city itself there was Blackfriars, whose name records the Dominican Order who used the venue before the Reformation. Closures, cancellation and societal shifts laid the groundwork for a dramatic revolution.

And in many ways early modern theatre companies were much better placed to respond to challenges than today’s. They were lighter on their feet, always touring, and in their early years only rarely took up a long-term residency in particular playing venues. This gave them enormous flexibility and meant that when a particular part of London or the country was affected by plague, the company could just go somewhere else.

Moreover, early modern performance took place outdoors. Even the large amphitheatre spaces, of which London’s modern Globe is a replica, did not have roofs, and though theatre historians have often explained this in terms of the natural lighting it provides — which allowed companies to avoid the expense of candles — this is also a very sensible ventilation system in a time of plague. We generally think of modern theatre as happening in buildings, but perhaps we need to embrace the rich tradition of outdoor performance as we explore theatre under Covid.

Early modern actors also had a rehearsal and performance schedule that would make most modern practitioners panic. Whereas today’s theatres often stage a single play for months at a time, early modern theatre companies constantly rotated their offering, sometimes putting on as many as ten different plays in a single fortnight. They were able to do this because they thought of both rehearsal and performance in terms very different from the dominant model in contemporary Anglo-American theatre today. Rehearsals were often about agreeing who would be onstage when, where people would stand, leaving the finer details — often considered to be the very stuff of rehearsal nowadays — to be worked out during the show itself. This means that early modern drama was much more amenable to improvisation and much less centred on text than the theatre we know.

One of the reasons that theatres will find it difficult to reopen under Covid is that rehearsal periods take place across several weeks, requiring a company to finance periods of rehearsal for a show that may never get to open. The planning time is itself now the problem; taking inspiration from the early modern precedent may be a way out of this impasse. Outdoor playing, innovation and more improvisation would make public entertainment more viable as we enter our second year of living with Covid. Fluidity and change have always been core parts of theatre’s business model. After all, the industry took shape at a time of plague.


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J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

My impression is that theatre has been stagnating for many years and audiences dwindling or at least failing to attract new, young members.
This painful period of closure might be just what theatre needs to stimulate innovation. I like the idea of more outdoor performances with the audience closer to the players as in Shakespeare’s day, and perhaps a more impromptu element.
I’ve seen so many youtube videos about flashmobs playing Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It looks like so much fun. I wonder if roving groups of players can do the same for short plays: appear suddenly in Hyde Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon and perform something that’s not too serious or challenging.
Idle thoughts from an idle man. I’m sure professional actors, playwrights, etc can come up with better ideas. They should certainly try.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Everything needs new ideas and they come from young people. Old people see new ideas as threats to their comfortable existences.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

That’s a great idea. I’m not sure how far it will to meeting the costs of bed and board, but it will certainly encourage the players to become responsive to what the audiences might favour

kathleen carr
kathleen carr
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Subsidized theatre will survive for now because it is a job creation scheme for the middle classes .The playwrights and actors who are still doing their bit for theatre are often over 80 and are basically the last generation who were raised without television-when they are gone will there be any appetite for theatre to continue?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Perhaps. I don’t know. I gave up on all the leftie-luvviedom years ago, having once been a very regular theatregoer.
However, the leftie-woke types who might still go the theatre seem to be the very people who are most afraid of Covid. So there’s a good chance they won’t be attending any public events for the rest of their lives.

Last edited 3 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Geraint Williams
Geraint Williams
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

….. and have you managed to find a far-right bigot theatre enclave in which you’re happy?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Well I go to amateur performances in which friends take part, and read Brecht at home.

David Barry
David Barry
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

“the leftie-woke types who might still go the theatre seem to be the very people who are most afraid of Covid”

How can you possibly know that?

Simplistic claptrap.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  David Barry

Tim Pool observed a few months ago that he couldn’t get lefties into his studio for interviews because they were so terrified of Covid. Conservatives, however, were happy to leave the house and go to his studio.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Yep. My daughter took me to Stratford in Summer 2019 and it has exactly the left-luvvie approach that the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon has.
Shakespeare, of course, was a Commoner, son of a glover, darling. But he went to Stratford’s grammar school — where the pupils came to school with up to 8 pints of small beer every day — and learned Latin and made up plays on classical themes. What you might call an education.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
3 years ago

The fundamental problem/dichotomy for the theater, the ballet and opera is that tickets are extraordinarily expensive. It’s one thing to pay a lot of money for a once in a lifetime experience, but quite another to pay for a “blah” experience. Even movie tickets are way overpriced and people will migrate, if they haven’t already, to looking entirely at home, even though many movies really do benefit from the big screen.

Jerry Smith
Jerry Smith
3 years ago

There’s Theatre, and then there’s theatre. So much of the discussion around the performing arts and the pandemic equates theatre with the west end etc. It is so much more than that. Personally I’m more interested in seeing the Edinburgh Festival re-established and small to medium scale local arts venues reopen and don’t give that much of a toss about the West End.

Kathy Prendergast
Kathy Prendergast
3 years ago
Reply to  Jerry Smith

So much professional theatre is so cringingly awful. I grew up in a “theatre family”, which means I was involuntarily subjected to enough bad theatre before the age of 20 to last more than several lifetimes. I don’t just mean bad productions; poor action, direction etc. can be forgiven as long as the play itself it good, but bad plays. These days – pre-lockdown I mean – I mostly attend only community theatre productions of comedies (am partial to Oscar Wilde) or musicals, or the odd Shakespearean comedy.

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
3 years ago

Just to fill in on Shakespeare: it was because he was out of theatre work in 1592-3 that he wrote two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His output in the Jacobean period may have been significantly impacted by sporadic outbreaks of the plague. His bleakest tragedy King Lear was possibly written during a thetare lockdown in 1606.

Kathy Prendergast
Kathy Prendergast
3 years ago

Interesting, isn’t it, that even plague lockdowns and business closures in Shakespeare’s time – over a horrific bacterial disease that killed almost everyone it infected – lasted a shorter time than lockdowns in our time over a flulike viral disease with an over 99 percent survival rate. But I wrote a novel (my first; possibly also my last!) during the lockdown back in the spring of 2020 after I was temporarily laid off from my job, so I feel a certain sense of kinship with Shakespeare now.

Sean MacSweeney
Sean MacSweeney
3 years ago

Not forgetting Cromwells puritan shutdown of Theatres as well, till the “Merry Monarch” Charles II reopened them all, which also led to the bigoted puritans sailing off in a huff on the Mayflower to the new world as they didn’t like the new religious freedom in England and preferred only their dogma groupthink

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago

Where is Basil Chamberlain when we need him?