Stages of Recovery. A Suggested Programme for Scottish Theatre 2020-2022.

 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 used to have in the past.

Another aspect of this chaos has been that everybody has been trying to think of everything all at once. What kind of shows can we do under lockdown conditions? How do you monetise the internet? How about drive-ins? Will audiences ever come back even when they’re allowed to come back?  What happens if a civic asset, like a theatre, goes bankrupt? How do I get on the furlough scheme? What happens to my staff when it ends?

It has been the instinct of many of us to seek refuge from these questions under a duvet with a bottle of Glenlivet till things “get back to normal.” I’m sure most of us have had days like that.

But I don’t think that “normal” is a useful concept at this moment. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up about wishing for it, or for asking ourselves all of the questions we need answers to all at the same time.  But emergency conditions do not make make for clarity of thought. My sense is that it is only now that some of us (I'm still under commission to NTS, as it happens) are lucky enough to be able to move into the next "stage of recovery" that we can take a breath and put forward something like a plan for a series of realities, none of which are going to approach normality as we've known it.

Stage Two: Critical (Sept 2020- Mar 2021)

After a number of false starts and isolated attempts at activity, I think that we have by now attained the shared understanding that we are not going to “get better” all at once.  No one is going to throw a switch.  It's a distraction to wish for salvation. We are sick. Getting better will take time and special measures. And we have to agree on those measures and act together or we will vanish amid rthe cultural din.

Each “stage of recovery” is going to be a self-contained process; each in succession needs to be agreed and monitored.

Conversations have been happening everywhere and institutions are shaking themselves from the dwam of shock. The Federation of Scottish Theatre has just agreed a twin track blueprint for advocacy and activity. The Scottish Government have agreed in principle to support the live theatre and music performance sectors, and have recently announced the formation of the National Partnership for Culture in Scotland.

Further, on Friday 3rd July, Fiona Hyslop and Nicola Sturgeon announced a £10m package of continuity support to carry theatres through until March 2021.  Although exactly how this be distributed and on what criteria remains a little unclear as yet, even as an interim gesture of supportive intentions and appreciation of the importance of the sector culturally and economically, it was extremely welcome.

All this is a huge advance on where we were.  We have a collective will and recognition, I think, of our plight and that we will need special measures of support. We are no longer crying in the wilderness.  We are taking part in a conversation. We need to translate consensus in the abstract into collective practice.

If we can start to assemble and organise all our ideas on collective consensus on a template of  "stages of recovery" as an agreed and timetabled package of “phased events” that we can work towards COLLECTIVELY as a WHOLE SECTOR and COMMUNITY, then we can seek out public and political support in a coherent way and a persuasive way. We can make a case for ourselves as key contributors to the refreshing of a whole society. Political focus is going to be strategically and necessary to making concrete plans out of our nebulous aspirations.

If we need a New Deal for Scottish Theatre if we are to recover, and I think we do, then I think we have to make an offer with which we "earn" that New Deal. It is now, in the Critical Phase, that we need to define and make that offer. And start on the process of delivering on it.

I hope and believe that with the right degree of focus, the National Partnership for Culture can be the forum in whch that New Deal is defined..and where we can start to deliver it.  I think if we get this early planning stage right, then we can aspire to be do things better than ever before, and with that aim in mind no suggestion about the structures whereby we managed and delivered cultural experiences three months ago should be left unexamined.

Stage Three - Convalescence (Mar 2021- Dec 2021?)

“Convalescence” as a medical concept involves an “imitation of life.” It means flexing your muscles so they don’t atrophy because you simply CAN’T do the real thing for a while. In this particular instance, it means theatre people doing what we can do to work our creative muscles…and gather energy and support at the same time

It ISN’T and CAN'T BE theatre as we know it…but hopefully we can still do some professional development work  (as well as outdoor and online projects, and even indoors with a limited audience) that is valuable in itself and will put us in a good place to do what comes next.  And, crucially, we can pay some people to DO things.

What we CANNOT do is make that kind of work pay. Gence we need government and sponsorship support...which I believe we would be far better placed to recieve if we can make a collective political offer in return.

The upcoming Scottish elections are an absolute fixed deadline for a national strategy. The theatre sector as a whole needs to act as a collective "gestalt" producer in order to make things happen for the sector as a whole.

If, God help us, this "stage of recovery" goes on longer than we hope, if there is "a second wave" of infection, for instance, then we need to seriously explore performance without an audience in the longer term, and stretching the work that has already been done by NTS, The Traverse and Pitlochry. In this context, I can envision a reinvention of the studio shot television play.

Scottish Theatre has a deep talent pool of designers, directors and builders as well as actors…and it should not be beyond the wit of ANY of them to be producing new work (or imaginatively and excitingly recycled OLD work) under these challenging circumstances. All we need, I suggest, is broadcasters willing to take it on, and that means producers, TV and Theatre producers, who are willing to take a punt on it…and funders and sponsors who are willing to back it.

Again, I see no way that individual companies can attract this kind of support. But "Scottish Theatre," as a composite entity, can.

Stage Four- Recovery (Mar- Dec 2021?)

What we should be doing is involving audiences experimentally in bringing back the "live" element of performance.  Once again, these activities cannot possibly be commercial in the sense we understood six months ago. We should therefore use the involvement of audiences as a way to go out and find the audiences we have been missing for some years now. I would suggest that if we once again prioritise a community focussed style of production appropriate to audiences in socially and geographically isolated circumstances…in health and prison settings, for example, schools…as well as village halls and community centres.  We can become integral to the recuperation of these commuity assets and cement ourselves into the wider society.  We are already an economic asset and a social one. We should make the most of the potential for enhancing our presence. We would be going a long way towards asserting communiatarian values as part of the recovery that we want to keep when the recovery is over. As with the "convalescence" work, the rule of thumb is to seek support for the kind of work we can be proud of.

In this phase, we are including audiences in the experiment of doing theatre again at all.  We should aspire to be doing it better with the following aspiration in our hearts and minds.

Stage Five - Relaunch 2022

I think should use the Edinburgh Festival in 2022 as the noisy, possibly even bacchanalian relaunch event for Scottish Theatre. With full productions for full houses. To do so an internationalist basis. To show that we’re back and show Scotland and the world our best.

I have chosen August…Festival Time…quite deliberately. We need a focus for an event that celebrates our return and renewal that is sufficiently distant for coherent planning and publicity. It mioght be that we include a Festival of New Writing, launching a set of commissions, some of which will feature at the NEXT Festival as fully staged productions.

I think we should be looking now to curating an event which will follow, as it happens, an election campaign, and which can focus our energies on a new and refreshed, reinvented theatre sector, quite possibly reorganised according to new principles on the scale of the advent of Arts Councils back in 1947.   Part of our relaunch should be a public, collective declaration of intent for the service of a wider, deeper Scottish audience and an international presence as a distinct theatrical culture. I think we can do a lot better than getting back to normal. 

I think it may well be time to reimagine theatre as a public good, starting from first principles.  Our public spaces are collective property.  And that is how they should be managed.

Stage Six - Festival on Tour – Sept 22 to Nov 22

In this we take the best of that relaunch out it on the road, serving and refreshing existing audiences and venues, and going beyond them, using the high public profile of the relaunch to declare our future intentions. I think we should be planning now for returning with a highly publicised bang in summer and autumn 2021. First at the festival...and then all across the country, everywhere, in every kind of venue...with a special emphasis on the geographically and socially isolated. I further believe that it is precisely the values of that “Scottish Theatre that is yet to be” that will get us through the accidents and alarms of the next couple of years.

The brutal truth of this epidemic and its economics is that not everything or everyone is going to come through it in exactly the same shape as they went into it. There are going to be job losses, and fights…and blood on the carpet.  There is a job to do with our cultural and political infrastructure before we can even BEGIN to daydream effectively. Unless we re-order what we do, change will still come..and it will come chaotically. And chaos, as we know, lets the bad guys win.

Geographically and socially we need to come back stronger than we were seven months ago. We need to be devising and enacting a programme of change...possibly based upon regional hubs and individual support as already outlined last December...and possibly also growing beyond the board and charity structures we've inherited from the aftermath of World War Two. If we do this right, we can move deliberately towards a necessarily more streamlined and purposeful model of arts provision.

Literally, there is NO time…there will never BE a time…like the present.

 …and in DECEMBER 2021, by the way, as part of getting a public emotionally as well as financially invested in the work we do, we should be doing the best set of Christmas shows, all across the country, in every kind of venue and public space, that we have ever seen.

Stage Seven - The Future (2022 - 2026/7)

I think we should commit now, as part of a New Deal for Culture every bit as radical as that instituted in the UK in 1946, and in the USA ten years before that, to a proper root and branch review of ownership and management of publically owned performance space in Scotland.  I think we should mean it this time, and get beyond the dysfunctional mess we stiched together post-devolution.

I think we should commit now to have an entirely new regionally and needs based model for arts provision and participation up and running in Scotland IN FIVE YEARS.  It may be that the new "Partnership for Culture" should have something like RENEWAL...more than just RECOVERY, as its aim.