Boards long untrodden
Early in March, photographer Helen Murray was driving across London, heading for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. Her car was packed as it often is with lights, cameras and a knot of extension cables, and the shoot to promote the opening of Bryony Lavery’s Last Easter was much like any other. Even as she was navigating the rush hour traffic while listening to a radio phonein show featuring increasingly anxious callers panicked about the spread of coronavirus, it was, she says, not obvious how much the world was about to change.
However, just a few days later lockdown was announced, theatres closed, and those whose livelihoods depend on the arts gradually began to realise that normal service would not be resumed for months, and quite possibly not until next year at the earliest.
“I remember listening to the radio thinking, ‘This isn’t good’, but at the same time life was continuing as normal and I don’t think the enormity of what we were about to go through hit me,” says Helen, who has been working as a production photographer for eight years. “Then overnight everything stopped. Theatres went dark, all the jobs I had booked in were cancelled and of course the pay cheques also stopped.”
Like many of those employed in creative industries, Helen is a freelancer and as it became clear that theatres, from the Globe to the National
With many theatres facing an uncertain future, Sarah Freeman talks to
Helen Murray who has gone behind the scenes to create a photographic love letter to an industry under threat.
where she spent much of her days, were unlikely to reopen anytime soon she began wondering about her own future.
“Quite early on into lockdown I knew that I wanted to do something which responded to what was happening, but which was also a photographic story in its own right,” she says. “I began wondering what all these theatres would look like without the people who bring them to life. I messaged a couple of artistic directors I know to ask if they would mind letting me in to do a shoot and they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about it.”
Our Empty Theatres, which can be viewed on Helen’s website, features 22 theatres and quotes from more than 100 members of the UK’s artistic community. The series took her from the West End to Liverpool, Manchester and the Leeds Playhouse, which hadn’t long reopened from its impressive makeover when the pandemic hit.
“Most of my work tends to be in London, but I thought it was important that I included the North as the closure of our cultural industries is something which affects all of us,” adds Helen.
“I hadn’t been to the Playhouse before, but it’s a great venue. It is the silence which gets