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Over 50,000 people have watched content I produced in lockdown. Yes I prefer real theatre too but it is mad to think that more people have engaged with my work in four months than in the previous 12 years.
I notice as people begin to return to real world theatre and embodied work that they are often using it as a chance to say how tired they are of screens and how crap lockdown work was compared to the real thing
But as a director who works in new writing, and who prizes artist led approaches and writer centric new musicals, I have found digital spaces to be far more democratic. Far more accessible and far more open to innovation.
I have long been saying that we care too much about audiences and not enough about writers. I see us obsess over giving audiences what we think they want rather than simply giving writers the chance to tell the stories they need to in the way they want to.
Digital spaces have been open to a 'build it and they will come' approach that centres ideas and creativity.
I simply don't have the money or the backing to do anything but elevate the writers I believe in, in the small ways I can. But I hope this time has shown that ideas are what count.
And if you're one of those people who celebrates your upcoming in person show by shitting on lockdown theatre (and I've seen multiple people do this). Then I feel like you're also trying to reinforce an unhelpful status quo
What I believe even more fervently after these past few months is that we need to let artists lead. If so, audiences will follow. But if we ask audiences what they want we will just keep photocopying photocopies until they get paler.
Additionally I've made actual friends with artists all over the world. We have collaborated and chatted and worked together across boarders and timezones.
I've also produced and consulted on work in Australia and America which would be impossible in any other time or situation.
None of this is intended to brag. It is intended to ask how we can keep these levels of accessibility, these levels of global collaboration, and these levels of creativity alive in whatever comes next.
There have been days where digital work has felt like Utopia. Like I have glimpsed the possibility of a world that stopped throttling art by asking "but what audience is this for?". That question haunts new musical theatre like it seemingly haunts no other art form
