Coronavirus: Scottish theatres have 'fallen through the safety net'

Six months on, the team fears opening night is getting further and further away.

“It’s absolutely grim,” says Alex McGowan, executive director and joint-chief executive officer of the Gorbals-based theatre. “In a normal September, we’d be very busy. We’d have a lot of actors either in rehearsals or on stage, directors and designers working on shows, quite a lot of freelancers involved and be gearing up to build for the Christmas show.

“And this year that’s all off.”

More than one million Scots visit the theatre every year, but very few have done so in 2020, and those few have either been undertaking hygiene and maintenance work or recording, rehearsing or broadcasting a performance – the industry has had to adapt to its new circumstances, sending work online through initiatives like Scenes for Survival, a 55 short-work series produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and the BBC.

Responding to the coronavirus crisis artistically, it’s also done so in practical terms, raising money for the technicians, directors, writers and performers left out of work and out of pocket by the unprecedented “dark” period.

There’s been the furlough scheme, of course, and the support for self-employed workers, as well as grant funding from the Scottish Government’s Performing Arts Venues Relief Fund and others.

That fund, administered by Creative Scotland, has been a “lifeline”, says Judith Henderson, director of the Federation of Scottish Theatre.

But Chancellor Rishi Sunak this week unveiled the successor to furlough, the Jobs Support Scheme which will top-up the wages of people in, according to the government, “viable jobs which provide genuine security” – those who are working but are not offered their full hours because of the pandemic. The terms of the scheme means anyone in a sector where doors are closed is ineligible and help is capped at 20% of earnings, unlike the 80% furlough level. “It’s not going to touch the sides,” says Henderson. “It’s 20% of your monthly average income – good luck.”

Then there’s the idea of viability, something Henderson says is “all about time”. “Working in a hotel was not viable in April but it may be more viable now.

“Our people are trying to work out what’s next. The fact that the UK Chancellor has cancelled his Budget is pretty dispiriting. He promised a three-year Budget, we haven’t had that for years and that might have given us a sense of that the future looks like in terms of funding.

“We are looking to Creative Scotland to confirm details of funding but they can’t tell us until they know what they’re getting from the Scottish Government, and the Scottish Government is waiting to hear from Westminster.

“It might be the end of the year before we know how things look.

“There are people out there who have lost literally a year’s income, families where both parents are facing redundancy. A lot of people have fallen through the safety net.”

Those gaps have led to crowdfunders springing up like that run by Underbelly for artists after the cancellation of the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe, which drew in £10,000 in little over a month. In another, Capital Theatres, which runs Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, King’s and The Studio, has raised almost £70,000 to protect its venues.

McGowan, previously of Edinburgh’s Lyceum, understands those cost pressures. “We have lost all our revenue-generating capacity,” he says. “Pre-pandemic, the UK theatre sector was extremely viable and world class. It’s been a tremendous success, not just in economic terms but in cultural terms, in the profile it’s given. Scottish culture and identify is really reinforced by what happens in our sector.

“All of that has been imperilled by the pandemic.

“We are not ‘viable’ because we are not allowed to reopen, therefore how does the new scheme work for us?

“I think of friends who are actors who, between jobs on stage, might be doing other things in hospitality or corporate work. These don’t exist at the moment. A lot of people have ended up becoming delivery drivers for the supermarket because that’s the only thing that seems to be available.

“We have received emergency funding for commissioning plays that won’t be staged for two years because we are trying to keep some creativity going.

“The pressure on the public purse is enormous and there are things like the NHS – we’re not saving lives, but we still need to come together as a society, as a community. We still want to think about the world we live in and tell stories to each other. It breaks my heart to think that by this time next year, theatre could be a shadow of what it was.”

Elaine C Smith told the Sunday National of her disappointment about not being able to finish the run. She said: ‘We had opened [in Edinburgh], we did two weeks and then closed and it was very, very weird.

The popular actress though felt most for those around the production who lost out because of the run being cut short and for those in theatres across the land.

She added: ‘People who don’t work in the industry, they don’t know how many people plays employ and the theatre employs.

‘They think of people like me, she’ll be all right, they think of the stars if you like, but it’s not.