Saoirse Anton

The other evening, I sat in an auditorium and watched a play.

When I last wrote a column here, that wouldn’t have been a particularly interesting statement. It would be like if I wrote “I had porridge for breakfast this morning” – run of the mill, nothing out of the ordinary.

But now, who knows what ordinary is? The other evening, I sat in an auditorium and watched a play for the first time in over six months. I was almost giddy with excitement. It was a different experience to pre-pandemic theatre; the audience was masked up, seats were carefully mapped out and marked up to ensure there were two metres between each of us and bottles of hand sanitiser were dotted about the place, but it still felt like theatre. That magic of theatre is something we need more than ever at the moment. Stella Adler once said that “the word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.” In challenging times like these, we need art to provide solace, to look in the mirror and understand where we find ourselves, and to discover new ways of living in different times.

As I wrote in my last column, back in March, times are tough but every show, even the most painfully dull and lengthy ones, must come to an end, and so too will this pandemic. For the past six months theatres may have been dark, but the people that work in them have been grafting tirelessly to find ways to keep the lights on and return to the stage. There have been online streamed shows, sitting room performances, podcast plays, zoom workshops, outdoor performances and so much more. I’ve lost count of the number of meetings and conversations I’ve been in tackling the questions of how to make work in a pandemic, and how to bring that work to an audience safely. Just as Dunamaise Arts Centre created a safe, comfortable environment for audiences to return to their theatre when I was there to see According to Sydney last week, every venue and company up and down the country, and beyond, has been innovating, creating and planning to find a way back to doing what they do best.

It hasn’t been an easy road back to the stage, there have been steps forward but also rough and painful slides back, and now more than ever, theatres and companies need your support to keep the lights on and avoid redundancies and closures. The good news is, it is easy to help – just go to the theatre! Dublin Theatre Festival is underway at the moment, with interesting performances working around the restrictions of the pandemic, such as To Be A Machine (Version 1.0) streamed live from Project Arts Centre, and the Abbey’s production of The Great Hunger, which is a promenade piece staged outdoors at IMMA. The New Theatre has moved outdoors for its production of Jackie, Bram Stoker Festival has moved online with events like I am NOT Legend (a reimagining of Night of the Living Dead, streamed into audience’s homes) and Irish Modern Dance Theatre are live streaming their new work Dances for Inside and Outside from The Complex. Many of those theatres that can’t bring audiences back through their doors just yet or can’t programme as much work as normal are still supporting artists to create work, through initiatives like Gap Days, Dunamaise Arts Centre’s Open Stage programme, and An Grianán’s Let’s Make Some Noise bursaries. If you can’t buy a ticket to a show, support arts organisations in activities like these by joining their supporters and friends programme, buying gift-cards, donating what you can, and sharing the work that they are doing.

Theatre will help us through life’s challenges, but right now we have to do our bit to help theatre through its challenges too.