On Rain Checks
We had plans this weekend. My family were due to visit us at our new place. I intended to cook for them and to make up our guest bed with freshly laundered sheets, to walk around the garden and ask my mum the names of plants I didn’t recognise. Coronavirus had different ideas. On Friday we entered semi-lockdown again. We rain-checked; crossed our fingers for Christmas. And I thought about how it has been this way all year. Everything provisional, as likely as not to happen.
I’m still figuring out how to live like this. I have spent my whole life pursuing a plan, racing towards the ambitions I settled on in my teens. When mapping out a future in theatre, though, it never occurred to me that one day the doors may simply shut. It has now been over seven months since I stepped inside a playhouse.
A quiet grief has fallen on many of us who have built our lives of art and creativity. There is the very real fear of not knowing how you’ll earn your living when the sector you’ve made your career is vanishing before your eyes.
Beyond this, though, what I’m grieving for is being able to make the kind of work I always have, in the ways I understand. I want to sit in a packed auditorium for a show I’ve produced, and to sneak glances around me in the dark, proud and nervous about what we’ve created. I keep telling myself I’ll never take it for granted when we’re able to do that again. But I don’t think I ever did.
I don’t think I took it for granted, either, that as a writer I got to follow my nose on adventures of my own invention. Now the places I’d hoped to travel to have become inaccessible; archives have closed their doors. Being able to make a life in the arts has always seemed thrilling and extraordinary to me. I am grieving for that, and I’m grieving for all the artworks that couldn’t be made this year. I’m grieving for how they would have changed me.
The future of the arts is dark. I’m afraid that the most interesting venues and organisations will vanish. The artists with the most perilous personal circumstances will be the ones that don’t come back, so we’ll lose the voices we need to hear from most urgently. One day I’ll want to go to the theatre but all that will be on will be Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and David Hare.
There is some small comfort, though, in bearing witness to how people have reached for their creativity to get them through this. Chalk drawings on the pavements, online choir recitals. Artists I know have been making work they never would have imagined before the words coronavirus entered our vocabulary, embracing this tentative new reality as their canvas. The usual rules don’t apply here, and the creative experiences I’ve loved most have been rough-around-the-edges and upfront about the unfamiliarity of the terrain.
On zoom, I watched a theatre maker attempt to recreate the one woman show she should have been staging at a major international festival in her living room using her furniture and desk lamps. Alone on our sofas around the world, she had us hold a cube of ice in our hands, share the pain of it melting. It brought us closer.
It’s as if our strange circumstances had made us all amateurs again. I haven’t put on any new shows since March, but I have written bad poems and baked experimental cakes and sung karaoke with my partner in the living room. One afternoon I spent hours in a dilapidated railway arch with strangers painting a 24-metre-long protest banner with the words OIL = DEATH. A few days later we dressed up in green, dropped it over Westminster Bridge, then assembled outside Shell’s head offices and danced badly to The Bee Gees’ Stayin Alive. I had nowhere more important to be.
When the arts are your day job, you’re used to the hustle towards whatever comes next, ambition constantly nipping at your ankles. It can be easy to lose sight of why you fell in love with the arts in the first place. But creativity contains its own rewards. There is little to be grateful for, this weird, difficult year. But I’m grateful to be reminded of that.