Something’s stirring in the West End
ONE of the many concepts we’ve had to get to grips with this year has been that of ‘disinfectant fogging’. It’s a method of cleaning an entire auditorium first mooted by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber as a way of bringing audiences back to West End theatres.
But it’s Nica Burns’s Nimax theatres that will be the first West End venues to reopen — at a loss, but helped by those antiseptic vapours. Fittingly, former doctor Adam Kay leads the way in an NHS comedy, This Is Going To Hurt, from October 22 at Shaftesbury Avenue’s Apollo Theatre.
The musical Six, about Henry VIII’s half dozen wives, is set to return to the same street — in the Lyric — from November 14 (unless it gets divorced, beheaded, postponed). The dancing queens’ vehicle will be the first musical to open in the West End.
Burns is hoping Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Magic Goes Wrong and The Play That Goes Wrong will follow soon after.
Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is waiting until social distancing is completely over, so there will be no magic at the Palace Theatre for a while.
Sir Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre has already shown how a return to live theatre can be achieved, with a little help from e-tickets, temperature checks, one-way systems, face masks — and a good blast of that sanitising mist.
Over at Sir Nicholas’s former stomping ground the National Theatre, they are hoping to get back on track next month with Giles Terera in Death Of England: Delroy. This is Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s follow-up to Death Of England, which starred Rafe Spall what seems like a lifetime ago, but was actually earlier this year.
It’s being staged in the Olivier, which has been reconfigured in the round to allow greater numbers while maintaining social distancing. And it’s a monologue — an art form we may have to learn to love.