All The World's A Live-Stream

Theatre in a pandemic. What to do? What to do? 

There's no question that we need theatre - or something very much like it - in a global emergency. People need stories. You can tell this by the sudden influx of brand new tales sweeping through social media like an apocalyptic plague of locusts, featuring characters like "5G" and "Track and Trace Nanobot" and "The FBI have released the alien files". Human beings need information - even terrible information - to feel fully human. And theatre is one our oldest vehicles for popping that story right in your head. Its really good at it. 

But the way things are now, and I suspect things will be like this for a very long time, we can't do theatre like we used to. For some reason its absolutely fine to get on a transatlantic flight, breathing recycled air in a flying metal canister, next to someone you don't know while watching the same Jack Reacher movie four times in a row, more than fine in fact: you must lay down your life for the sake of the economy - it is your patriotic duty. But watching three people arse about on stage for an hour in a room full of laughter is utterly verboten. That's just wrong and you would be a fool and a communist to suggest otherwise. People booking holidays generates income and that's important. People don't spend money going to the theatre - oh, except they do. Its a massive industry, generating billions of pounds. But that doesn't play well to this Etonian government's continued disavowal of the "elites", whereas a fortnight with the lads on the Costa del Golf is bang on the money, and if you die you die. They don't care. 

Ahem. Sorry. 

So angry right now. 

The show must go on. But how? Well, in different ways. For instance I've been working with Amadan Ensemble on my Old Curiosity Show, as part of the Eastside Arts Festival. I say I've been working but I've really just given the script a couple of re-writes (yet more verse - and a running joke about boils that never made the cut) and Amadan have been doing the lion's share in cahoots with the indefatigable (I've tried to fatigue him - he wasn't having it) Alan Meban and his big box of technical wizardry. The result is going to be a highly sophisticated blend of live action and pre-recorded pieces which, hopefully, won't look sophisticated at all. It takes a lot of seamless technical precision to look this ramshackle. The cast were initially wary of the technology - even though it was their idea - and worried about the loss of immediacy that you get from losing an audience, but they found a new way of performing quite naturally and with Alan's multi-camera framing and vision mixing it's proving to be a very exciting blend of talents. It is also very, very funny. 

Its the piece I've written that's had the most transformations. Parts of it came out of a show that Shot Glass Theatre put on called Voices Off. Bits of it then snuck off into pieces for Accidental Theatre and Belfast's Culture Night. I then wrote two new segments for it and it became, briefly, The Chill Factory before becoming The Old Curiosity Show and finding a home with Amadan who have produced it twice and are now making this new peculiar, fusion version. I am genuinely excited. I don't know what to expect. Amadan are supremely gifted physical comedy performers, always looking for bits and pieces of what they call fuckery - subverting the conventions of theatre and exposing the bare bones of storytelling with a straight face, gumming its workings and jamming a stick in its spokes. The stories for The Old Curiosity Show come from my love of Victorian melodrama and cautionary verse, the work of Tod Slaughter and Hilaire Belloc, and from the clammy and threadbare world of strolling players: the grease-painted cheeks resting on damp B and B pillows. These stories are funny, creepy, magical and tawdry. And so much fun. We pull them apart. We muck them about. But we love and respect them. 

You'll be able to see that in the show - its knockabout, affectionate fun. And now its coming to your living room. Close the curtains. Shine a torch under your chin. Drink your absinthe from a human skull. 

But please drink absinthe from a human skull responsibly.