SHOW WILL GO ON EVENTUALLY

Theatres have faced many virus closures

During the great flu epidemic of 1918, Broadway movie theatre manager Harold Edel decided to go against general advice and encourage audiences to turn up. He ordered a full-page ad in a movie magazine praising the people ‘who took their lives in their hands’ to come to his theatre. He died of flu before the ad appeared in print.

With the number of people involved in productions it’s no wonder theatres try to stay open. But for insurance purposes, it’s always handy when the government takes the decision out of your hands and orders the closure.

And typically, you can never keep Shakespeare out of the picture where theatres are involved. The big message now is to keep your distance and keep your hands clean. Shakespeare has been used by the group Fossilheads to boost The World Health Organisation hand-washing sequence, using Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing dream speech, above. To see it, just type in ‘world health organisation out damned spot’.

A neat topical twist is that, in 1603 the newly-installed

King James was facing a new outbreak of bubonic plague that he feared would delay the unification of England and Scotland; in 2020 Boris Johnson is facing Covid-19 and a Scottish parliament pushing for the break-up of that very union.

In July 1606 a new outbreak of the plague in London forced Shakespeare to close down his company and move out of his Globe Theatre. But he had a stroke of luck. Later in the year, after the plague, the Blackfriars theatre was vacated by the Boys companies that played there and Shakespeare was able to move in. It was an indoor theatre where he could put on plays during the winter using artificial lighting, while producing plays at the openair Globe in summer.

He had survived the terrible plague that hit London in

1603, but his luck ran out in 1613. A cannon fired for effect during a performance, sent a spark into the straw roof of The Globe and the theatre was burnt down.

The Theatre Royal and other places of entertainment were shut down by order of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the city during the plague of 1665. It was 18 months before the theatre opened again. It escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666, but fate is fickle – it was burnt down in 1672.

British government reactions haven’t changed much. An order of 1665 commanded that houses which had people suffering from the plague should be quarantined and locked up, as a form of self-isolation. Houses were to be closed up for six weeks if one of the inhabitants became ill; the sick were to be restrained from mixing with others and ale houses were to be limited in number.

Some of the public response sounds familiar. There was a riot in one part of the city, where a crowd broke down the door and released the inhabitants of a quarantined house. Houses with victims of the plague were sometimes marked with crosses in red paint to warn other citizens. Some residents got over that by washing off the crosses.

One theory about the 1665 plague, that killed a possible 100,000 people in London, was that it was spread by dogs and cats, so a cull was carried out and thousands of dogs and cats were killed. In reality, cats and dogs were the most effective way of getting rid of the rats with their fleas that caused the disease

The diarist Samuel Pepys, that great reporter of the theatre and the plague, describes terrible sights in London, and writes of ‘the madness of people’, who, despite advice to avoid funerals, ‘come in crowds to see the dead buried’ and in an aside he thinks ‘nobody will buy wigs after the epidemic for fear it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague’.

Pepys has one interesting reflection on theatre habits. ‘I sitting in a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me ...not seeing me. But after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.’

Pepys also has something for climate changers. Writing in January 1661, he records:

‘no cold at all …the rosebushes are full of leaves, such a time of year as was never known in this world before.’

‘With the number of people involved in productions, it’s no wonder theatres try to stay open’