The Valley of Ignorance

PANDORA’S BOX PANDORA’S BOX                                  Pandora’s Box is a place of delights. Every time you open it, you find something rich, strange and surprising…Pandora’s Box the series is a place where the studio based television drama is re-invented. Where the small screen does not attempt to be a window on the world. Rather, it is a doorway into the mind. Inspired by such “portmanteau” shows of the past, such as Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and shows of the recent past like “Inside No 9”, in every 30 minute episode, Pandora will present from her “studio” a completely self- contained drama…sometimes funny, sometimes scary, sometimes poignant, but always strangely hopeful. Deriving from the first influence comes an emphasis on character and situa...

I have written and posted the last distillation of my views on strategy for the Scottish Theatre sector, at least until someone engages with me seriously. I will promote these essays I’ve done on social media. They have become my task in the last three weeks at least in part because the future of my existing work, all the scripts, as well as my current commission for NTS, is so radically uncertain. This radical (as in rooted) uncertainty is in some ways just an intensification, of course, of my usual situation: I never know the future more than a few weeks or months ahead.   I am completely reliant on my own self-belief, and the belief that the work I and my colleagues do is of importance to people…at least of sufficient importance for them to fork out the occasional twenty quid for a ticket and a couple of drinks. So at the one time, I feel both familiarity and vertiginous insecurity.   And am consequently creatively entirely paralysed.   I can’t even read. The ...

It is now a notorious truism that it is a lot easier to impose “lockdown” than to end it.  You don’t need to understand how society works in order to shut it down, you just have to shut it.  But it turns out that you cannot re-open it without considering in what order in which to do that…and that the order of opening implies an understanding, even a consensus about the ordering of the things that make a society work. And now that we're on the point of re-imposing elements of lockdown (a lockdown that for some people never really started, and for others has never really ended) another fascinating mirror is being held up to our nature?  What really matters to us?  What matters most?   Will we, like Caliban, rage at the sight of our own ugly face in a mirror? Back in March, we made value judgements between the rate of infection and societal coherence. To give an obvious example, the hospitals were not shut down. The emergency accomodation and isolation o...

  STAGES OF RECOVERY I think there are five Stages of Recovery for Theatre Making in Scotland.   I am finding it useful to think in terms of recovery from a serious illness.  Let's start with where we've been. Stage One : Emergency. (March 2020 to Sept 2020) We closed our theatres and most of our industry down. We're still numb at the shock, three months on. The new order has been a chaos of improvisation for some and of immiseration for others.   Some of us have instinctively been shouting and waving, yelling “Hey, look at me! I’m still alive!” Some have hunkered down in whatever protective bunkers were available to them.  Others have watched their livelihoods and maybe their careers disappear like smoke. There are individuals and institutions in immediate danger of closure and redundancy, and for them, the period of "emergency" is far from over. It's hard to think about the future when you're scrabbling like crazy to hold onto what you u...

Whisper it. 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 have to face the fact that my current commission…which I feel very lucky to have, by the way…might be 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 for the cameras, sitting and standing at least six feet apart from one another. Now I can do that. I might even get quite excited, artistically, by the prospect of something like that. But who the hell is going to pay for it? How much will they pay for a socially distanced evening in a one fifth full theatre where they get their temperature checked before they go in. £80.   £120? Seriously?  As an individual, like everyone else, I have no way of knowing anything. But as a small cog in the collective “business” of Scottish t...

CULTURE, TOURISM, EUROPE AND EXTERNAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE INQUIRY ON THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON SCOTLAND’S CULTURE AND TOURISM SECTORS SUBMISSION FROM PETER ARNOTT, PLAYWRIGHT I want to try to move past the immediate and even medium term impacts of the Virus on, in particular, the performing arts, to more prescriptive ideas about the way forward We are under no illusion that anyone can flick a switch between emergency lockdown and “back to normal.”   There will be many Stages of Recovery from Convalescence to The New Normal,  which I, like others, have explored elsewhere. Each of these will make its own as yet unpredictable demands and present limited but tangible opportunities. Practitioners will need imaginative responses to each.  So will management at the level of companies and funders which will in turn demand the active participation of local and national government. What I want to argue here and now is that NONE of these stages of recovery, up until ...