‘That New Normal everyone keeps talking about might be already here. The Titanic has hit the iceberg’

With the arts world facing a grim future, playwright Peter Arnott says members of the country’s theatre community need to make the case for themselves collectively as a public good to survive in an age of social distancing

Whisper it. The closure of the Lyceum in Edinburgh until at least the spring might just be the start. You see that “New Normal” everyone keeps talking about being just round the corner? This might be it. It might already be here. The Titanic may already have hit the iceberg.

I’ve just started work on a long promised commission of a script for the National Theatre of

Scotland. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m hugely grateful for the faith and support. I also have to face the fact that I might be writing an adaptation of a well-known Scottish novel for a cast of eight to ten actors who will never perform the play in front of a full, live audience. They might have to tell the story on a studio set, sitting and standing at least six feet apart from one another. I suppose there might be an audience of some kind there, at about one fifth of capacity, who’ve all signed an indemnity form and got their temperatures taken as they went in. Or maybe the audience will consist solely of three or four television camera people on a set no doubt brilliantly designed and lit, but never to be seen by a live audience at all.

What I might be writing is a 100-minute television feature, perhaps played “as live” but all shot in a controlled, socially distanced space that in six months’ time, or a year’s time or two years’ time might be what “a theatre” is.

Now I can do that. We can do that. I might even get quite excited, artistically, by the prospect of doing something like that. But, and this is the real point I’m pursuing with this daydream, who the hell is going to pay for it? It won’t make any box office income, and even the wellresourced National Theatre of Scotland is going to have to deal not only with that restriction of income, but also the recession which is already accompanying the epidemic and which right now has shut down a third of everything without anything resembling, as far as I can see, a realistic plan for eventually reopening restaurants on an economically sound basis, never mind theatres that people might actually want to go to for a good night out.

We don’t know anything for sure, of course, our destiny, like everybody else’s, is not in our own hands.