London’s theatres are our Sleeping Beauties — it’s high time they are revived
WELL,” the great actor Charles Laughton used to say at the start of his one-man show, “this is a pretty old arrangement: an actor and an audience.” And so it is: ancient, immemorial part of the fabric of our civilisation.
Until March, when the old arrangement was suddenly suspended. Actors and dancers, singers and players did of course remain connected to their audiences through the 20th Century’s great innovation, recording: you can hear your favourite performers and you can see them. What you can’t do is change them. Their performances are fixed forever in time. The whole point of live performance is that the performers change the audience, and the audience changes them. That reciprocity, the give-and-take that brings us all, performers and spectators, into time present together has gone out of our lives.
Of all the many catastrophic consequences of Covid-19, this was the most unforeseen: that the ever-lively performing arts, endlessly inventive, gleefully competitive, joyously life-affirming, economically productive, a sphere in which Britain is universally acknowledged to be, in the now sadly devalued lexicon of Boris Johnson, “world-beating”, should have been instantly paralysed at the very moment when they would be most needed. All my colleagues and I have felt it intensely — our utter uselessness, our impotence in the face of an urgent need to get people sharing stories, being reminded that, as the old Duke so beautifully says in As You Like It: “We are not all alone unhappy.” Of course we can be told stories on television, but to get involved in an emotional journey, or for that matter a comic one, side by side with people who at the beginning of the evening are strangers but by the end, as Dickens puts it, feel themselves to be fellow passengers to the grave, is something else altogether.
It’s corny to drone on about the war, but during the last one, and indeed the one before it, there was everywhere across the country a sudden longing for live performance, and actors, singers, dancers and musicians, braving genuine danger, spread out in a great artistic diaspora which immeasurably aided morale, resulting in the outcrop of government-led artistic activity that followed the war.
The flame was kept burning, until it became a blazing beacon. At present, the flame is guttering, all but extinguished. Not quite, though. This last week, I’ve had the honour of being the first actor since lockdown to act in front of an indoors audience. Raffaello Morales, conductor of the remarkable Fidelio Orchestra, which is made up equally of professional and highly skilled amateur players, is also the proprietor of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Clerkenwell, where he has been presenting performances, mostly involving their splendid Steinway, prior to serving supper. The Café, like all restaurants, had to close once the virus appeared. When they reopened, it occurred to Raffaello that not only could the food resume, so could the performances, if properly socially distanced. He swiftly arranged a season with some of the finest musicians in the world — Isserlis, Kolesnikov, Ibragimova — each playing a week of performances for just 25 people an evening. He wanted an actor in the mix: I chose to do something about Dickens, who lived just around the corner from the Café, in Doughty Street, and whose first job was round the other corner, in Gray’s Inn Road, and who knew — thanks to the rock concert-like public readings of his work he gave in the 1850s and 60s — perhaps more than any other novelist has ever known, the importance of a live audience.
I called the show An Audience with Charles Dickens. It was an extraordinary experience all round: for me, a renewal of my vows to the audience, because of whom, and only because of whom, I am an actor at all; for them, the initially scary but eventually gratifying experience of sitting in a public place and sharing a story with their fellow punters in real time. They were often shy at the beginning of the performance, then became increasingly uninhibited, boisterous even. The flame has started to burn brighter.
Last year, I wrote a book called London’s Great Theatres. It was intended to be a celebration, but is now feeling alarmingly like an obituary. London is my city and to walk past the closed and shuttered venues is dismaying; it’s as if they’d been blinded. There are more of them in this city than in any other in the world. Even when a play has not done well, there is always a sense of life about the place. Now the foreground figures are absent. It feels as if we’re in a film, the sets of which are painstaking reproductions of the real buildings and streets. Where are the people? Where is the life? If Covid were a hostile power, as it sometimes seems it is, how it must rejoice at having kept the enemy out of theatres, halls, opera houses. To his credit, the Culture Secretary has secured a large chunk of money for the performing arts, more than any of us had expected. Alas, it is not enough to save an entire industry which, with the exception of the subsidised theatres, has no other source of income but its paying customers, and whose work force is largely made up, not of tenured workers, but of freelancers, among them the entire acting profession.
The matter is pressing, because the world of theatre is made of highly perishable elements, above all the human element — those whose lives have been devoted, for modest rewards, for the most part, to acquiring extremely specialised skills, and who will simply have to find something else to do unless a way is found to throw open the doors of these ensorcelled buildings again. When, after the last war, Sadler’s Wells Ballet returned to its home in Covent Garden, it pointedly chose to stage a new production of The Sleeping Beauty. The theatres and concert halls of Britain today are sleeping beauties. They need to be revived. We must get the people back into the them. We are an ingenious and inventive lot: we must not be defeated.
This last week I’ve had the honour of being the first actor since Covid to act in front of an indoors audience