See it safely: Has caution made theatre an endangered species?

PROLOGUE

We began drafting the post below some time ago, at a time when we were wondering if we would ever blog about theatre again. Our last theatre visit took place a week before theatres were closed in March 2020, and at the time, few anticipated how long the journey back to normality would be. Once theatres began to re-open, the debate shifted to the question of how theatres could tempt audiences back, and how they could do so safely. There was very little discussion about the effect such measures might have on audience numbers, and even on the nature of theatre itself.

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Imagine we are back in 2019 and you are on your way to the office.  You get to the front entrance and there are a couple of people standing outside handing out hard hats ‘to make you safe’.  Do you go in?  Do you feel safe with your hard hat, or is your mind racing, wondering what kind of threat has come to your office to make you need a hard hat?

Whatever the answer, it is impossible to introduce safety features to a scenario without also invoking a threat.  Try the old trick of ‘not thinking of an elephant’ and you’ll see what we mean.

Like many theatre-lovers, we watched with great sadness the demise of live entertainment in 2020.  We were all dreading winter 2021.  Then, just as things seemed to be looking up, in December we saw mass cancellations and theatres cancelling shows once again due to fears of the omicron variant.  Reporters were quick to point out how unfair it was that theatres were suffering when they had done so much to ensure that they could re-open safely.  We agree, it is extremely unfair – but have theatres unwittingly added to their own problems by alienating their core audiences?

The purpose of this post is not to argue the ins and outs of lockdowns and covid measures, but simply to ask the question – can an industry that had human contact at its core ever make itself truly safe, and are there any drawbacks?

We are going to look at two measures to try to answer this question.  The first is temperature checks.  This is a curious one, something that was dismissed early on by government guidance as a measure which had no real value and might even promote a false sense of security.  Even UK airports stopped using it pretty quickly.  And yet theatres seem particularly fond of it.  When I tried to find out why, the response I got seemed to become a mantra – ‘for the comfort of audience members’.  It seemed that theatres were more interested in making people feel safe than in actual results.  Yet this is not a cost-free measure.  Anyone unlucky enough to fail this test will be refused admittance, the theatre has to refund their ticket, and if they spent money on travel or accommodation, they won’t get it back.  Why introduce something that will severely inconvenience audience members for little or no return?

Something we noticed early on was that theatres, in contrast to cinemas and hospitality, sent out numerous surveys to prospective audiences, keen to find out what would attract them back into the theatre.  This was not about government guidelines as such, it was about finding out how safe people felt.  We can see the logic – it doesn’t matter how safe you are if people are not feeling it.  But it was striking that the sole assumption behind these surveys was always the same.  What measures would make you feel safe enough to return.  We never once saw a survey asking if we would be put off by measures such as masking, temperature checks or vaccine passports.  So if there were people out there eager to return, but not at any cost, theatres would not know about it.

We found an arresting piece of research from the US about the attitudes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people.  It had been widely assumed that people who had been vaccinated would be more confident about returning to pre-covid activity, but this research showed the opposite – people who had had the vaccine were still less likely to go out, travel, visit theatres, etc, than those you hadn’t.  This might not be that surprising – people who are more risk-adverse would tend to be over-represented in the vaccinated group, but did theatres think about this when they started to introduce vaccine passports before the requirement came in for England?

Essentially a vaccine passport can take many forms, but in England we are talking about a requirement that requires someone to either be vaccinated, or to take a covid test before a performance.   Either way, you need to either download an app or produce a piece of paper.  It doesn’t stop an unvaccinated person from attending, but it certainly makes it a lot more inconvenient.

Whilst the hospitality industry was broadly against the system, fearing it would damage the sector, theatres embraced it even when they didn’t have to.  Perhaps they could be forgiven for wanting to find a way to open safely and reassure audiences, and they didn’t realise at the time that the measure had limited effectiveness in terms of safety.  Many governments that have persisted with vaccine passports have now admitted that it is not about safety at all, but about using ‘rewards’ to drive up vaccine uptake.  Whatever you think of this as a strategy, was it wise for theatres to get involved in something that might damage their business, especially and most importantly if it didn’t really make the experience any safer, and could possibly have led to a false sense of security?

Could it be that theatres, by adopting a raft of measures and using the slogan See it safely, the official kitemark developed by the Society of London Theatre, were actually signalling that theatre was anything but safe.  Theatre will never be completely safe, after all. But can we say for sure that people would have stayed away in droves without safety measures?  Or would fewer measures have actually been more reassuring?

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EPILOGUE

Since that time, more and more questions have been asked about the efficacy of covid safety measures, and we leave our readers to judge for themselves on that issue. We did not feel it would be right to resume posting without making some reference to those times. The post above is our highly personal take on the issue. For the record, although we have not been reviewing, we began returning to theatre about a year ago, once all compulsory measures were past. And although the recovery for theatre does seem to be progressing more slowly than for other sectors, we look forward not just to a return, but a resurgence.