Introduction and context

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK’s theatre sector was generally thriving. Audiences were buoyant and it was widely regarded as world-leading for the quality of its production, its resilient infrastructure and its notable economic impact. However, as highlighted in Chapter 2, workers across the performing arts were among those most negatively affected during COVID-19 and over 80 per cent of the performing arts workforce before the pandemic were self-employed. Some of these negative impacts relate to historical structural issues including inequalities within the workforce, funding gaps and disparities, and unsustainable business models. During the crisis, the theatre sector was forced into making and accelerating changes to the strategies and modes it used to make work and to engage with its audiences, which inevitably led to a strong focus on digital adaptation and distribution. Alongside the enforced and repeated closure of buildings, this shift challenged organisations of all scales to make radical decisions about their business models and tackle issues of productivity, quality, capacity and skills that are likely to have significant implications for policy, management and training for many years to come.

Lockdown experiences of making and watching theatre have raised important questions about the future roles of physical spaces, shared or synchronous experiences and definitions of authenticity, and regarding audience perceptions of the relative value of digital and live performance. They have drawn closer attention to inequalities of access of all kinds. Some organisations have ‘leaned into’ their learning and engagement functions to maintain and sometimes deepen audience relationships that otherwise may have been fractured during the crisis. Innovative and adapted models for engagement using remote, hybrid and blended formats have been trialled. Combined, this activity reflects the intensified attention being paid towards the social and civic role of theatre in the mid-twenty-first century.

In this chapter, we examine these phenomena and discuss their implications across the timeline of the pandemic. We highlight some of the convergences and divergences within the sector and between it and other cultural sectors. We build on research engaging with theories and concepts drawn from arts management, cultural leadership, cultural value, cultural policy studies and audience studies, specifically the public role of arts and culture, which identifies a ‘relational turn’ (Walmsley, 2019). We highlight repercussions for communication, building solidarity and tackling inequalities within the sector’s workforce. At the chapter’s heart are the insights gained from over fifty semi-structured depth interviews undertaken throughout 2020–2021 with theatre professionals across England, a sample drawn from different organisation types, geography, business models and roles, and including freelance theatre professionals. The lived experiences of these primary stakeholders are explored in depth via three short illustrative case studies comprising a large national organisation, a mid-scale regional theatre and a smaller company with an innovative place-based model. We also draw on complementary strands of the wider project, including audience research and analysis of the UK’s Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey.

Impacts on the workforce

 Chaos and uncertainty

The advisory and then enforced building closures and introduction of social distancing that followed the announcement of the first lockdown on 16–17 March 2020 left UK theatre and its workforce in a state several interviewees called ‘absolute chaos’. Immediate practical tasks were pressing: buildings needed to be secured and mothballed, touring productions dismantled and sets moved and stored, while cast and crew were dispatched without any indication of when or if they might be called again. Programming had to be rescheduled and ticketholders informed, compensated and their expectations managed, all despite the absence of any clear picture of when theatres might reopen. But once theatres had fully shut down, their leaders were left to deal with the human implications of the crisis. In almost all cases, theatres had not undertaken any significant risk assessment or scenario planning for a pandemic and managers were poorly served by human resources (HR) staff. It was estimated that more than 15,000 theatrical performances were cancelled in the following twelve weeks, leading to over £300m in lost box office revenue (UK Theatre and Society of London Theatre, 2020). In many cases, managers turned to their boards to bring in urgent legal and HR support to guide them through rapidly devised government policies on furlough and existing legislation on redundancy. As one leader commented: ‘The board really stepped up amazingly, were really keen and willing to meet as much as needed and that ended up being at the hardest points fortnightly.’ Reassurance was provided, ‘even if it was just hearing them say “no one has ever done anything like this, so there is no playbook”’.

A punishing and extended period of uncertainty began for everyone, while there was little indication of what additional support, if any, would be made available to fulfil the needs of the people working in a sector, which – unlike hospitality or retail – was never going to be able to easily remobilise from a standing start. Subsequently, throughout the crisis, senior leaders found themselves on a constant treadmill of financial planning and replanning to support multiple funding applications, working to very short deadlines and constantly shifting reopening dates. At the same time, organisations needed to focus on their vanished audiences and their displaced artists and volunteers. They also had to lobby for funds and negotiate with sector partners – urgently assessing freelance contracts, complex co-production agreements and even capital development projects, while simultaneously appealing to audiences to remain loyal and donate lost ticket sales. This all placed a heavy burden on organisation life, and on leaders in particular, causing heartache and stress and leading to feelings of guilt. If before the pandemic cultural leaders required a range of skills and attributes ‘little short of the miraculous’ (Leicester, 2007, pp.6–7), now they were operating in a whole new sphere and by the end of 2020 many were very close to burnout.

There were new and evolving rules and ways of working to negotiate and a lack of clear precedent or regulation in place to guide employers. Interviewees talked of ‘stumbling through’ and ‘constant firefighting’. As for financial or strategic forward planning, one compared the process to ‘crystal ball gazing’. Where tired, static business models left some largely unable to pivot, as one director of a small studio theatre put it: ‘it just became an office job – the most boring desk job in the world … all about keeping a business alive that isn’t really even doing anything’. In short, the theatre sector was overwhelmed and faced a perfect storm from all directions: the traditional business model, inculcated over centuries, disappeared overnight. However, and perhaps most urgently of all, theatre managers and leaders had to deal with their own staff.

Many employees were initially apprehensive and frightened, and this uncertainty exacerbated the inherent management challenges. But in many cases this situation resolved quite quickly following the announcement of the Job Retention Scheme, which most leaders regarded as a lifeline. Regardless, organisations experienced significant challenges around the pivot to home working, which required them to overcome years of presenteeism and woefully low investment in IT. A positive repercussion, however, was the establishment of more regular internal communications as rapid improvements in IT infrastructures generally enabled better visual and verbal staff engagement. Organisations also had to make difficult decisions about who to keep on, who to furlough and who, if anyone, they might need to make redundant. Confirming the quantitative data presented in Chapter 2, redundancy hit younger workers the hardest, particularly those with under two years’ employment who therefore enjoyed fewer rights; however, older workers were also disproportionately vulnerable and/or chose to accept voluntary redundancy packages, which left some larger organisations bereft of a generation of traditional stagecraft skills.

 The plight of freelancers

Most painfully perhaps, and as earlier chapters in this volume demonstrate, the crisis exposed long under-acknowledged issues caused by precarity and exacerbated by the inequitable ways in which theatre’s workforce is structured and remunerated (Comunian and England, 2020; DCMS, 2020). It has since been claimed that ‘no other industry outsources its creative leadership or its innovation to such a degree’ (Freelancers Make Theatre Work, 2021, p.8). When the pandemic hit, the twin central pillars of the UK Government’s pandemic policy response – lockdown and then the implementation of the Job Retention Scheme – created an inequitable situation for those across the performing arts who were self-employed, and for the many portfolio workers or those employed on casual or zero-hours contracts (DCMS, 2020). In many building-based organisations, those in the latter group included staff employed in important components of mixed business models, such as hospitality or retail. Our interviews documented how, while many leaders sympathised with their freelance and temporary workers, most moved instinctively into ‘survival mode’ and turned their focus inwards: as one director told us bluntly, ‘[freelancers] can’t have the same expectation of continuing employment with an organisation as a permanent staff member’. Similarly, while casual staff may have initially been supported in some organisations, this eventually proved unsustainable, with most quietly ‘falling off the books’ as venue closures extended into 2021, thereby often leaving the remaining workforce even less diverse than it had been before the pandemic.

Other research suggests that many freelance theatre workers responded with typical resilience, developing innovative practice, skilling themselves up or moving sideways into digital work, starting courses of further education, and seeking or expanding previously held portfolio roles outside theatre (Maples et al., 2022; Shaughnessy et al., 2022). However, despite the introduction of the Coronavirus Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS) in March 2020, the complex nature of employment in the sector meant that a significant number of freelance theatre workers still fell through the gaps, leaving them unable to claim support and seeking alternative work or turning to Universal Credit (Maples et al., 2022). Anxiety and frustration were expressed on social media and elsewhere at the inequalities implicit within policy responses, with the experience of freelancers and smaller organisations often pitched against that of bricks-and-mortar organisations and what Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden MP had damagingly termed the nation’s institutional ‘crown jewels’ when introducing the sector’s £1.57bn rescue package in July 2020. Our interviews also pointed out a difference in experience between those working in the subsidised and those in the commercial sectors. Indeed, one director of a large commercial theatre told us that it felt the national narrative was consistently driven by the subsidised sector.

A lack of understanding of the respective positions and circumstances occupied by those working within different parts of theatre’s ecosystem was highlighted regularly by interviewees. Harnessing such concerns, the Freelancers Make Theatre Work movement was formed to provide a collective voice for freelancers, campaigning to industry and government and demanding a seat at the table in discussions about support, recovery and reset. Faced by the real hardship being experienced by many individuals, we did hear stories of larger organisations proactively working across their theatre ecologies to support smaller companies and freelance artists both financially and in terms of professional support – for example, to apply for alternative sources of funding. Various organisation-backed initiatives with similar aims also sprang up. For example, in May 2020, 150 performance companies and venues signed an open letter addressed to freelance workers, followed by a pledge to sponsor an individual member in working as part of a Freelance Taskforce intended to strengthen the voice of the freelance community (Fuel Theatre, 2020) in all key conversations. Organisations often noted their involvement in collegiate initiatives such as Greater Manchester’s Artist Hub (see Chapter 9). Many also expressed a personal sense of responsibility and reported engaging in pro bono as well as funded mentoring, advice and development support for freelance colleagues during the crisis.

Overall, our research identified a sharp rise in collegiality across the cultural sector and this was certainly true in the theatre sector where existing networks strengthened almost overnight and new networks quickly emerged to offer moral and operational support. Theatre workers were keen to share their stories and help each other and perceived networks as ‘silently looking out for each other’. One interviewee described the tangible impact of these networks as profound: ‘It did feel like those networks did have some actual influence …the amount of pressure that was put on the government from the whole theatre sector …I genuinely don’t think that money would have been anywhere near what it was if the sector wasn’t … collectively lobbying the government.’

However, for many theatre freelancers, time and labour already sunk into development of future work (generally unpaid) meant that many were already significantly out of pocket when the pandemic struck. While some commitments for cancelled work were honoured immediately following the initial lockdown, this was not uniformly the case, with distressing results. One creative producer, for example, voiced frustration and anger at a major building-based organisation that, she said, had simply backed out of a project that had been four years in the planning: ‘The two lead artists said to me they felt disposed of.’ Any new work on offer necessarily leant towards learning and participation or digital programming. So, for those already well networked or with these in-demand skill sets, the pandemic generally bit less hard. Indeed, some theatres found themselves directly employing more freelancers than previously: delivering learning and participation work online took greater resource than its in-person equivalent and they reported an increase in collaboration with local authorities and statutory support and third sector organisations, providing targeted support for groups such as economically disadvantaged children, young people and families.

As the crisis extended, some freelancers felt that ‘transparency and communication’ from organisations finally reached a level that many had been demanding for years. However, opportunities handed out to freelancers still sometimes felt, as one venue’s senior leader termed it, more like ‘crumbs’ from the table; others argued that, as usual, cultural recovery funding simply failed to ‘trickle down’ from larger to grassroots organisations or to individuals in the way that some had clearly anticipated.

 Experiences of employed and furloughed staff

For those who remained employed, the stresses were different, although many also found themselves reflecting on the fragility of the industry, its unsatisfactory career structure and the inflexibility of its normal working conditions. Additionally, interviewees pointed to disparities between the experiences of those furloughed and those who remained working. Those working often found themselves ill-equipped and in unfamiliar territory; they were required to take on multiple and different roles, to use different skills and to bear heavier workloads: ‘All the usual structures and boundaries and parameters that we usually adhere to went out the window and we all had to get stuck in’, one senior manager told us. As a venue director confided: ‘[M]‌y role … doesn’t resemble any job description I have ever seen … it’s all about interpreting and enacting government guidance.’

Some staff, in particular members of facilities and technical teams, were furloughed well into 2021. Furlough was capped for most, affecting those on higher salaries. While many organisations made efforts to include furloughed colleagues in regular communications, there was widespread understanding that many may have felt frustrated and isolated. However, there was also some resentment among those who remained working. This was part fuelled by the knowledge that furloughed colleagues were not exposed to the same pressures and had perhaps even picked up additional work in other sectors while some of those remaining working had taken pay cuts to keep their organisations afloat.

Those with existing skills at the intersection between live and digital or with assets ready to be made into digital native performance were well placed to benefit. In contrast, interviewees expressed particular concern around prospects for independent technical, facilities or backstage specialists, many of whom could be offered no possibility of work for extended periods. A hint at the difficulties that might accompany a full reopening came when several commercial production companies were part of Operation Sleeping Beauty, an ill-fated (most closed before opening night) attempt to rehearse and stage panto in 2020, supported by the government and underwritten by the National Lottery. A director involved in one of these productions that we interviewed struggled to bring back technical and front-of-house teams since many had found alternative work. Those who remained employed often found themselves questioning their career choice, as did freelancers and those who were furloughed and could not find rewarding work in other more agile sectors. As one freelancer mused: ‘Why am I working in theatre? It doesn’t offer any security …pay rises in theatre just don’t exist. The Equity rate goes up so, so slowly …. It’s a mad industry to work in anyway, and then to have something happen like this…’

Throughout 2020 and 2021, feelings of exhaustion, dislocation and anxiety about what might happen as a consequence of failure were common for those who continued working. Interviewees with caring responsibilities described ‘flexible’ hours extending into late nights and early mornings while working from home: ‘I think it’s important to acknowledge that the personal really does impact on the professional at the moment’, one manager told us. Interviewees frequently expressed a sense of duty and generosity towards colleagues and their local and wider communities: ‘It’s been relentless. I think everyone has found that. … And the energy of constantly reimagining and feeling like you want to do so much more is really hard in itself.’ Such feelings perhaps reflected Alacovska’s (2020) argument that cultural work should be viewed ‘as a labour of compassion as opposed to a labour of passion’ (p.728); and compassionate and emotional labour takes a heavy toll: there were reports of increased sickness rates and new or exacerbated mental health conditions, with some organisations seeing high levels of uptake in their creaking wellbeing and counselling services (when they were fortunate enough to have these). Others talked of training employees in ‘mental health first aid’. Each new lockdown created fresh scars, as hopes for returns to normality were raised and then dashed. Everyone felt most keenly the absence of the thrill of live theatre and the physical presence of audiences and of colleagues. With ghost lights flickering in many empty theatres, it was hard to keep delivering work that, for many, smacked of compromise.

Case study: Theatre Absolute

‘To be honest, we have not stopped working’, Theatre Absolute co-founder and director Julia Negus nevertheless confessed in January 2021. Embedded in its local community, Theatre Absolute opened a small shop-front theatre space in central Coventry in 2009 as a short-term project; the company never anticipated that it might still be there thirteen years later. Project funded, with a small core team supported by a network of associates, the theatre creates cross-disciplinary performance, offering audiences and performers opportunities to explore radical or disruptive narratives.

In March 2020, just three days before the opening night of a long-planned project, the first lockdown forced the shop-front theatre space to close. The resulting loss was creatively and emotionally challenging for everyone, and while backing from funders Esmée Fairbairn was never in danger, significant income from the bar and hires was lost, ticketholders had to be contacted and reimbursed, and the two leaders were very conscious that staff, freelance artists, all those involved in future planned commissions, and the theatre’s audiences might all need support.

The organisation adapted immediately: ‘We’re storytellers at the end of the day, so we created a raft of work both so that we could keep commissioning freelancers …but also be with our communities.’ Importantly though, alongside multiple funding applications, the core team took time out to nurture their own artistic practice and reflect strategically, working with a consultant on the company’s mission, vision and values. A series of online workshops for Coventry-based writers culminated in a series of micro-commissions and an online sharing event. Emergency Response Funding from Arts Council England meant that they could also offer mentoring and a one-to-one online script dramaturg service: ‘We could have run that four times over!’ Mindful of the strong correlation between everyday creativity and emotional wellbeing (Wright, 2022), Theatre Absolute also made and posted out 300 Writing Boxes filled with stimuli and prompts to support creativity at home.

Across multiple lockdowns, the shop-front space remained an asset, despite being closed to the public. Its large street-facing windows formed a changing exhibition space, engaging passers-by with film, photography, poetry and textiles. Local artists were offered short solo residencies along with a small bursary – no strings attached – allowing them to make work or just to be in the space. The company had never viewed its work within and with its local communities and the shop-front space as separate because the space wouldn’t exist without those who make and come in to see its work; its creation was ‘a deliberate act of civic theatre’. The pandemic saw Theatre Absolute renegotiate its relationships with its audiences while developing a heightened sensitivity towards inclusion and the barriers to it. The company felt that some relationships deepened through the use of digital technology: ‘There are lots of people who won’t engage in the physical space, for lots of reasons.’

As part of plans for the regeneration of Coventry city centre, the building in which the shop-front theatre is sited is scheduled for demolition in 2023 and the theatre will close. It is clear though that the pandemic will be writ large in the company’s future plans because of its role in highlighting the inaccessibility and lack of inclusivity affecting many cultural spaces and places. At the time of writing, these plans included short residencies in community and public spaces around Coventry alongside digital and online delivery. The company is also determined to make work that can form an exemplar for care and compassion, for themselves as theatre producers, for those with whom they work and for those living their lives around them.

Organisations: mission, vision and citizenship

As the effects of lockdown prompted many organisations to focus more regionally, local cultural ecologies consolidated and this led to new collaborations on funding bids and pioneering community projects. In the very early days of the pandemic, there were instances of fractiousness as the stress of unpicking artistic contracts and co-production deals began to take its toll. There was inevitably some ‘unpleasant financial wrangling’ with collaborators, which damaged some existing business relationships in the short term. As noted above, relationships with freelancers were sensitive and in some cases not helped by certain unions who, wittingly or not, quickly sowed seeds of division.

Emergency relief income (Economic Resilience Fund¹ and Culture Recovery Fund) saved many theatres and producing companies from bankruptcy, but some smaller organisations found the application process ‘insanely complex’ and felt that it wasn’t designed for them. As the lockdowns eased, organisations started to reassess their financial positions and get on with the business of programming and reprogramming, with some interviewees admitting to making safer choices. Many organisations used the break in producing and presenting work to focus on schools and/or community engagement: ‘We’ve really leant into our L&P [learning and participation] work. It was always a really vital part of our creative programme, but at the moment it is our creative programme.’

Policy-makers initially responded slowly, with some demonstrating limited understanding of the complex logistics, operations and infrastructure of the sector. This resulted in a set of poorly researched COVID-19 restrictions, all of which presented a raft of new challenges for live theatre. Not least of these were the 1–2m social distancing measures which essentially made live performance financially untenable. These presented a particular challenge for commercial venues, which were not eligible for relief funding. The government’s tiered approach to Covid restrictions played out differently across the country; theatres in some regions (including London) could open for most of autumn/winter 2020 and much of 2021, whereas others (especially in north-west England) remained closed for months on end. Some theatres struggled to deploy box office, front-of-house and hospitality staff as even many of those who had been furloughed had either found other (often better-paid) jobs and/or enrolled in higher education courses to skill up. This recruitment crisis endured into 2023.

Confirming our findings from the Cultural Participation Monitor (see Chapter 3), existing audiences proved slow to return to live events. Many theatres felt as though they were almost developing audiences from scratch: one director commented ‘I think we have to think about our theatres as if, it’s almost as if we are opening them for the first time. It’s not a kind of everybody’s ready to come back through the doors, it’s like going into a place of low engagement and deciding you’re going to build a theatre and opening campaign.’ As another interviewee put it: ‘turning up and just expecting people to come to the theatre is old-fashioned now’. Although we know that audiences didn’t broaden or diversify on a macro level, many theatre companies did see new audiences emerge to them, as existing cultural audiences became increasingly omnivorous and hungry for cultural content and engagement. Moving towards full reopening in 2021, therefore, many organisations also took time to review how they were engaging with their publics. The results included plans to ditch printed brochures, initiatives to deepen relationships with existing patrons and strategies to re-examine ticket pricing models that might encourage new or cautiously returning audiences.

Case study: The National Theatre

As elsewhere, shutting down was a traumatic experience for the National Theatre (NT). This was the first time in its then forty-four-year history that the NT had closed its building and its shutdown was not just unprecedented; it was also unplanned and occurred in a vacuum of public information. As one interviewee put it, ‘there was skeletal information and a heightened sense of fear …. The HR team were out of their depth. We all made mistakes and communicated badly.’ The stress was ‘phenomenal’ – decisions had to be made within hours, including closing the theatre and sending staff, actors and audiences home before that evening’s performance. Staff had to track down 150 colleagues working across the large site and communicate complex information rapidly and sensitively. Staff and audiences had fundamentally different levels of understanding about the pandemic at the time and there were vulnerable people to consider among both groups.

The pandemic brought immediate change and speeded up planned strategic developments. Before COVID-19, NT was reliant on 85 per cent capacity to balance its finances and it quickly had to reconsider this unsustainable income model. In the words of one director, ‘The P&L [profit and loss financial statement] was not robust: we were reliant on a bit of luck and a prevailing wind.’ As another director confided: ‘It dismantled the business …it’s been about survival, not strategy and it’s knocked any sense of certainty out of the business.’ The immediate financial impact was ‘grim beyond belief’ and the organisation only survived thanks to its £15m reserves, emergency government funding and a loan of £20m. In this sense it was a victim of its own success and had to radically rethink its business model alongside its concept of its own resilience. NT realised how key its strong national networks were; this meant they could quickly be harnessed and mobilised to address the immediate challenges and collectively lobby for support.

On the positive side, the pandemic forced a wider range of staff to engage with the business model, encouraging greater understanding of the need to manage budgets very tightly and take ‘a more business-like approach to cost management’. It also encouraged a more entrepreneurial use of the venue’s spaces, with the Lyttleton being temporarily transformed into a lucrative film studio, producing in-house content for global film media networks. The organisation responded much more rapidly and radically than it ever would have in normal times, where pressures on box office income historically delimited opportunities for business model development. Innovation notably included the launch of National Theatre at Home, representing a shift not only in the business model but in the ethos of the entire organisation to embrace domestic engagement with theatre. Over 10,000 people subscribed to the streaming platform in the course of several weeks, forcing the theatre to redesign its intellectual property policies, its evaluation metrics and analytics and its entire audience engagement model.

The organisation quickly came under pressure to support its significant number of freelance staff and accessed its Benevolent Fund to support freelancers who were at risk of losing their homes. As one senior manager pointed out, the pandemic immediately ‘shone a light on who has career security’. The discrepancies between different cohorts of staff – those who were furloughed versus those who weren’t; those who were made redundant versus those who kept their jobs; employed versus freelance – inevitably created tensions and feelings of guilt: ‘It feels like an incredibly bruised organisation: there’s a sense of survivor’s guilt.’ This sense of injury was confirmed by another interviewee who confided: ‘Wounds have been left; people feel like they have been through a traumatic time and we’re trying to heal the wounds as quickly as possible.’ The ‘survivors’ were soon pivoting to home working and working harder than ever, covering for vanished colleagues and cancelling annual leave. Redundancies were significant and took an artistic as well as psychological and operational toll: 25 per cent of permanent roles had to go to achieve cost savings of 30 per cent, culminating in an overall loss of 50 per cent of staff who were on the payroll in February 2020; the diversity of staff decreased from 19 per cent to 15 per cent against a target of 30 per cent; and a whole generation of stagecraft was lost almost overnight, compromising skills and institutional memory.

Exhaustion soon set in, but this was tempered by a shared sense of a more nimble organisation facing unique opportunities: ‘I’ve achieved things that it would have taken me years to achieve …and it forced us to rethink inclusion.’ Former Executive Director Lisa Burger summed up the strategic challenges as follows: ‘We’ll have to rethink everything and we’re tapping into the energy of change …. The ambitions are undimmed, but the resources are much less.’ Despite these ambitions, the interviewees all communicated the need to do less but struggled to identify what might have to go. Although the official line in 2020–2021 was ‘people not stuff’, by the end of 2022 there were no clear plans of how to scale back activity – apart from touring perhaps.

When asked to envisage the future of the sector for prospective cultural workers, one staff member commented: ‘It’s too hard to exist in this business; it’s just not worth it. Unless you’re middle-class and you have some sort of financial backing, it’s impossible, especially in London.’ If theatre is to survive, he added, it will need to be ‘less nostalgic and complacent. It will need to wake up, modernise and take its place in society if it’s to become a twenty-first century business’. His colleague was more upbeat: ‘It’ll be a tougher ride than ever before but if you’re willing to ride the storm, then do it!’

A pivot to civic?

Reflections on the social value and civic role of theatre took place in a heady atmosphere that included heightened awareness of structural inequalities and of economic precarity resulting from the combination of national and global pandemic impacts and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements following the murder of George Floyd. Although diversity (or rather the lack of it in the arts) was already high on the agenda prior to the pandemic, theatre organisations told us they felt positively challenged by BLM. They described anti-racism and diversity action work accelerating during the pandemic pause. One common manifestation of this were attempts to diversify boards of trustees. The newly ubiquitous use of video-call meetings reportedly helped this drive, with organisations finding that the technology encouraged and enabled attendance from a wider group of people: ‘I don’t feel we are limited any more by our location’, the director of a small theatre on the east coast of England told us. This director had also taken the disruptive opportunity offered by the pandemic to commission new and more diverse work than its usual programming strategy would have allowed. Another interviewee described how, as a trustee, she had invited a young person to shadow her during the pandemic, with the aim of demystifying the board process and demonstrating a place within governance for alternative voices. Whether or not any changes to the make-up of those boards during this time have lasting impact on the overall governance of culture in the UK (cf. O’Brien, Rees and Taylor, 2022) remains to be seen.

As our earlier case studies suggest, freed from their business-as-usual delivery mode, theatre-makers and organisations whose doors were closed for almost eighteen months found themselves ruminating on alternative business models, organisational structures and processes, fundamental questions of value, and on what closure and the likely legacy of the pandemic would mean for their long-term visions and missions. In alignment with the dynamics of current cultural policy and the funding associated with it prior to the pandemic, some theatres had already embraced roles as place-making institutions or community hubs. However, some larger organisations in particular expressed a newly awakened ‘sense of civic duty …and a bit of local pride’ in bringing theatre back to their communities and felt motivated by the chance to be ‘a better citizen’, as one director put it. Others, particularly some of those more commercial organisations unused to civic or community engagement work, told us they were overwhelmed by the loyalty displayed by their audiences and buoyed by messages of support from members of their local publics; it was comforting ‘knowing how loved you are by the city’. However, our research discovered that for others, an apparent shift towards the civic arose to fulfil more utilitarian and short-term purposes, often to the consternation of smaller companies, some of whom had been operating in this space for decades.

Regardless of motivation, many organisations started to examine opportunities for an involvement in pandemic response and recovery in their local areas. This pivot reflected Mintzberg’s (2009) observation that community-minded leaders ‘see themselves as being in the centre, reaching out rather than down’ (p.142). It was notable that even regional commercial theatres experienced the crisis as a motivating force to join these conversations, something one interviewee from the commercial sector described as a ‘silver lining’. Engaging more deeply with local communities meant that organisations could deliver on existing commitments while offering employees and freelancers tangible and meaningful work. They could obtain or sometimes flex or justify existing funding by channelling it into education and community outreach projects. They could also increase or maintain their awareness with important stakeholders within the local economy, thereby staking a place at the table for discussions around ‘reopening’.

However, while delivering services of civic or public value was helping to build or cement relationships with local authorities, with voluntary and third sector partners, and with leaders representing other sectors within their local civic infrastructure, our research suggests that, in contrast to the museum and gallery sector, in delivering this work fewer organisations appeared to see this replacing their traditional core role. When asked what they considered this role to be, interviewees frequently reflected on a vision of themselves as, above all else, providers of live entertainment.

Maintaining and repurposing buildings

The stability of this vision meant that for many, the closure of physical buildings was particularly painful. Seeing their buildings dark was challenging, particularly for members of staff whose working lives were so closely tied to them. As one senior leader mused: ‘The building is the engine room and I can’t do anything until it’s producing great shows again.’ For commercial venues, the decision to mothball during the pandemic was simple: ‘Obviously those massive productions don’t come out of the goodness of their heart, so for us to work, we need to be profitable to producers.’ Unused spaces, which still needed to be secured and maintained so that they could reopen as quickly as possible, presented a consuming concern for all theatres. Many older theatres were in dire need of capital refurbishment before the pandemic, and there were worries that this capital stock had further depreciated during closures. Certain buildings – like Wakefield Theatre Royal’s historic Charles Matcham auditorium – simply could not function either front- or backstage given the requirements of social distancing. Faced with this, some theatres, including The Lowry in Salford, moved their work outdoors and into communities, or carved out alternative uses for their theatre spaces.

Case study: The Lowry

Losing 95 per cent of its income, moving staff to working from home and closing its doors to audiences overnight was a scenario that no one at this large Salford-based theatre and gallery complex could have planned for. In the decade prior to the pandemic, the managing charity had made successful strides towards complete financial sustainability. In March 2020, like many other building-based organisations, The Lowry faced the perverse situation that the less it did, the more sustainable it would remain.

Emergency Response Funding from Arts Council England and the furlough scheme proved vital support. Then, in autumn 2020, Culture Recovery Funding allowed The Lowry to sustain its artistic programme into 2021. Furlough continued for many, but staff were asked to take pay cuts, hours were reduced and some opted for voluntary redundancy. Even these actions could not compensate fully for the £200,000 per month cost of running a mothballed building.

The organisation began exploring options early for alternative uses of the space, settling finally on a relationship with the Ministry of Justice that saw its smaller Quays Theatre used for criminal hearings as it functioned as a ‘Nightingale Court’ between September 2020 and August 2021. Relieved to find a solution that would help it survive, The Lowry was undoubtedly naive in not foreseeing the backlash – ‘when people threaten to burn your building down’ – that it, and fellow Nightingale Court venue, Birmingham Rep, faced, with local communities and some creative partners accusing them of breaking trust with groups and individuals likely to experience the court system as unjust. In early autumn 2020, the move also felt somewhat ‘against the Zeitgeist’ as elsewhere the sector was cautiously reopening. With hindsight and following renewed lockdowns at the end of 2020 and throughout early 2021, its caution felt justified.

Supporting vulnerable young people is core to The Lowry’s mission and its learning and participation work continued throughout the pandemic. However, in delivering it, staff had to develop new digital skills at speed while also finding ways to address issues of digital exclusion. As it became evident how badly the pandemic was affecting young people’s mental health, activity moved from online to face to face (where possible), but in community venues: ‘We’re on people’s doorsteps more than we ever have been.’

The team also extended its work and deepened its relationship with local statutory and voluntary bodies, including the local authority. It joined with other Greater Manchester providers in developing creative packs as part of Free School Meal provision. Strong relationships with schools also continued, including through digital artists-in-residence placements. A programme of in-person creative work delivered outdoors was well received. As a result, the organisation has found itself able to fast-track plans to continue similar programming that will extend its presence beyond its walls and the immediate ‘Media City’ locale. Effects of this could be longer lasting than any moves to digital during the pandemic, most of which it found difficult to exploit financially.

When we spoke in 2021, The Lowry was emerging from the pandemic bruised. The crisis had been incredibly challenging for all its staff, whether furloughed or dealing with heavier workloads, fewer resources and the pressures of working from home. Some key team members were lost and in 2021 skills gaps arose in functions such as development, fundraising and marketing. The organisation and its employees are now facing the need to exercise pay restraint for several years as part of a commitment to servicing the £7.3m Culture Recovery Fund Repayable Finance loan it secured in 2021. Financially, there is little doubt there will be an extended and potentially painful journey to full recovery. Audiences were slow to return in 2021 and producer confidence remained unpredictable. Since any smaller and more challenging work will necessarily need to be heavily subsidised by commercial shows, it was clear there would be knock-on implications for future programming.

Despite these challenges, The Lowry feels more able now to articulate its ethical and artistic voice. It, and its senior leaders, have recognised anew the value that its many ancillary staff generate. Its experiments with building use mean that it understands how space can be ‘an adaptable tool in our armoury’ and it is now moving further out into the communities that surround it. In addition, there is a strong sense that civic and community engagement during the pandemic has created a distinctive platform for future work, reinforcing The Lowry’s value to partners such as the local authority, to the local cultural ecology (including freelance creatives), to philanthropic donors and funders, and to Salford residents and audiences.

Touring

The future of touring provided another common topic for discussion. Here, interviewees reflected not only on the effects of the pandemic but also on those linked to rising supplier costs, concerns around sustainability and climate change, and on barriers to free movement within Europe post-Brexit. The Cornwall-based touring company Kneehigh Theatre was perhaps one sideways casualty of the enforced time for reflection while their subsidy encouraged them to continue producing work during the pandemic. In June 2021, Kneehigh announced that changes in artistic leadership had led trustees to reflect ‘on a possible new future but [conclude] that it was better and more responsible to close Kneehigh and ensure an orderly wind down’ (Kneehigh Theatre, 2021). Elsewhere, rumblings of concern about touring among those we interviewed were widespread: even successful mid-scale touring companies confirmed that the level of guarantees and fees offered to them and smaller companies was likely to hamper any recovery, as the reserves required to underwrite touring would need significant rebuilding for even the very biggest of national operators: ‘it’s a broken system’, one interviewee claimed. Several suggested the period post-pandemic might provide the perfect opportunity to develop ‘slow touring’ or located-residency models, enabling touring companies to embed their work and ethos within specific communities and to connect work more closely with audiences and their associated everyday, sensory, political or economic contexts. However, potential practical repercussions of shifts like this, others worried, were that rural or already culturally disadvantaged regions might further miss out on theatre within their local areas.

The rapid shift to digital

Many organisations focused on training, revisioning and restrategising – for example by ‘thinking about audiences in a more holistic way’ – while others experimented, to varying degrees of success, with digital production, distribution and engagement. Interview data revealed a theatre sector excited about the potential of digital but struggling to monetise it, especially in the face of competition from national companies. The story feels familiar (at least on the surface) to that experienced across other parts of the cultural and creative sector (see Chapter 8), with organisations and individuals finding themselves greatly accelerating their digital activity in the first months of the pandemic. As in other sectors, where resources were available to put online or stream, these were not always of high quality; crucially for theatre, there were few platforms available through which organisations or individuals could effectively market or make money from them and this remained an abiding concern throughout the pandemic. While streaming free content online might have been good for staff morale – and it did, interviewees told us, sometimes result in good engagement from audiences – it solved few financial problems and, worse, may even have contributed to ‘digital burnout’. Many companies lacked a sufficiently high-quality digital archive to stream for free. Additionally, they described struggling not only with the skills required for and technicalities of filming digital content, but also with ethical and legal questions around how to recompense those who had been involved in original productions and with navigating copyright requirements for music and other assets. The NT At Home (‘it did stop local theatres really being able to enter that landscape’) and Netflix effects (‘we can’t recreate Bridgerton; we don’t have the budget’) left theatres wary about the nature and purpose of their digital output. In the end, a singular disinclination to engage with it was expressed in different ways by many interviewees; as one producer clarified: ‘We make theatre. It’s what we do.’

Despite this general sense of resistance to digital formats for performance, success stories did emerge. Indeed, some digital native productions succeeded in addressing a need and desire in audiences for a shared experience. For example, in collaboration with a studio theatre, one small Bristol-based theatre company co-produced an interactive murder-mystery on Zoom: ‘It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t really work in the theatre, it’s not like the artists are having to compromise to go online.’ By July 2021, two iterations of the show had resulted in sell-out performances that reportedly reached more than 20,000 people. While audiences dropped away when hospitality businesses reopened, in 2022 the company experimented with innovative technology allowing remote audience members and actors to appear co-located on the screen (Telepresence Stage, 2022).

Elsewhere, the NT claimed schools’ engagement through free digital as one of its pandemic success stories, and other organisations noted high levels of engagement for Christmas performances live-streamed free into care homes or schools. Additionally, productions that may have attracted only a small or niche audience in live performance reportedly received wider worldwide interest when streamed online; examples include a 2021 production of Overflow, a monologue from the perspective of a trans woman set in a toilet, staged at the Bush Theatre in London, and a video-conferenced production of The Tempest on Zoom from Creation Theatre that even generated a small profit for the company (Aebischer and Nicholas, 2020). For learning and participation programmes, existing activities aimed at young people or other targeted groups were moved online, with varying degrees of success. Technology certainly kept the activities afloat, which meant that theatres continued to serve their communities; but for most of those involved in delivering these programmes, it was often viewed as second best to in-person participation: ‘We’ve done some stuff, it’s not brilliant. It doesn’t replace meeting in a room and having a cup of tea.’

However, there are signs that the experience was formative in demonstrating which groups might genuinely benefit from a blend of technology and in-person activity. There were increased opportunities for accessibility and inclusion offered to groups and individuals who might otherwise be unwilling or unable to cross the threshold of physical spaces and their sometimes surprising (to providers) take-up of the offer. Successful examples included online writing workshops involving disabled people or for women experiencing domestic violence, and sessions that brought together community groups sharing similar backgrounds and experiences but who remained separated by geography. Crucially, alternative formats did not just mean sessions solely delivered online: interviewees described running activities with older people over the telephone or in mixed groups with some people using Zoom; they talked about maintaining pastoral provision for young people using WhatsApp and of conducting slow performances involving the exchange of postcards or letters. A good number claimed such experience had increased their understanding around the potential of hybrid or blended provision for inclusion and suggested this might be a long-term legacy of the pandemic. However, as other researchers have suggested, such a legacy will need careful maintenance if its gains are to be sustained (Feder et al., 2022; Misek, Leguina and Manninen, 2022).

Thus, despite some positive experiences, theatres experimenting with providing a space for digital work more frequently expressed a sense of the experience being difficult and even dispiriting. The problem was exacerbated by skills gaps in marketing the work and an insufficient understanding of audience behaviour in digital spaces. An overwhelming desire to return to live theatre and the sense that there is as yet no satisfactory model for reliable revenue generation from digital provide powerful counteracting forces that appear likely to dissuade theatre-makers from further experimentation and investment. This, as well as a lack of evidence for a significant increase in online public cultural participation during the pandemic, suggests that the sector has a lot to learn if it is to understand how and why audiences might take up future digital offers. It also needs to differentiate between the fundamentally different activities of digital production, digital marketing and digital engagement and appreciate the different skills involved in each (Cirstea and Mutebi, 2022).

Conclusions and implications

Our research with theatre professionals across the UK illustrates how the painful experiences of the pandemic often led to pioneering ideas and initiatives brimming with potential. While all theatre organisations had to be incredibly agile to survive during the pandemic, the smaller ones certainly benefitted from not having to ‘turn a big tank of an organisation’. Among the larger organisations, The Lowry’s increased sense of being able to express its value within its local community and beyond its walls points to ways in which changes (and mistakes) made during the pandemic might leave the sector leaner but perhaps more articulate. Meanwhile the National Theatre showcased how digital theatre can function effectively in people’s homes and has proven the concept of digital theatre subscription.

While Theatre Absolute’s team and their associates struggled with personal and professional loss and exhaustion, the company also benefitted from the enforced pause. In this, they were not alone: through our research, we saw other organisations undertaking transformative work on their visions, structures and processes, including diversifying board representation and actively seeking to change recruitment practices. Perhaps, as several interviewees suggested, shifts in leadership or representation for diverse voices will only truly take root when space is carved out within funding cycles to allow for a more measured, moral and relational approach to developing and supporting those working within the sector. Helpful here too, we observed, were business models whose success was not predicated upon large or unequal labour structures and organisational models that included community or cooperative ownership and compassionate leadership, meaning that skills, responsibilities, accountability and losses could be more equitably balanced and shared.

Theatre in the UK and indeed globally has been at crisis point and it remains in a place of transition and flux. Although many theatre companies have reignited their relationships with local schools, communities and providers of public and voluntary services, their core audiences are proving cautious to return and the current cost-of-living crisis will only exacerbate this caution. Some theatres have seen hard-won reserves wiped out or are now servicing significant loans in an era of rising interest rates; the pandemic has taught them that relying on box office and retail income no longer guarantees resilience. If the sector is to maintain its position as a mainstay of people’s leisure time and a significant contributor to both the population’s wellbeing and the national economy, it will need to continue to collaborate, innovate its business and production models, and revolutionise the way it engages audiences old and new. As one of our interviewees reflected, it will also need to convince the public and policy-makers of its ongoing relevance and be clear about its cultural value and impact: