When the curtain comes down

Theatre has been forced offstage before now, whether for disease or war, but it has always managed to survive and reinvent itself

- Michael Billington

Sienna Miller and Harry Hadden-Paton in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path, described by Churchill as ‘a masterpiece of understatement’

IT might seem gratuitous to write a column about theatre when the buildings are closed and coronavirus is forcing us all into a state of hibernation, but, without minimising the gravity of the situation, I thought it might be worth examining how theatre has coped with crisis in the past and how it can justify its existence in the future.

Theatre has, of course, shut down before now. In January 1593, plague struck London and the Privy Council decreed that ‘we think it fit that all manner of concourse and public meetings of the people at plays, bearbaitings, bowlings and other like assemblies for sports be forbidden’. The theatres were to remain closed for a year and a half. One obvious victim of the ban was a jobbing playwright called William Shakespeare, who was starting to make a name for himself with plays about Henry VI and Richard III. What did Shakespeare do? He turned himself into a courtly poet, writing Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. However, as Jonathan Bate brilliantly argues in Soul Of The Age, after his enforced sabbatical: ‘Shakespeare returned to the stage with a new-minted art.’

Once the theatres re-opened, Shakespeare gave us what Prof Bate calls ‘the dazzlingly intellectual Love’s Labour’s Lost, the miraculously imaginative A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the quicksilver Romeo and Juliet’. It is surely no accident that, in the last of these, the spread of infection is woven into the plot and a line that resonates strongly is Mercutio’s ‘A plague o’ both your houses’.