PHOEBE HYDER was a 2020 Poel Workshop applicant.  As well as performing as an actress she creates much work as a puppeteer, movement director and puppetry director, working across stage and screen.

As an actress at the very start of her career I found it hard to comprehend but also grieve for something that I was only just getting my foot in the door of.  Many early-career artists like myself have felt the blow of lockdown harder than most established artists for the very simple reason of not being established… it’s back to the beginning as you try to build up the momentum and network you were just getting a grasp on. But despite the lack of ‘in the room’ opportunities and the prospect of tangible future work, lockdown has presented me with some awesome ways to keep theatre alive that wouldn’t have come about otherwise.

Firstly, I was part of theatre company Les Enfants Terribles’s creation Prism, an online theatre production, along with a collated cast of 2-3 minute clips from artists all over the country. These were made in isolation by the artists, the brief being: ‘a world to escape to’ and from there you could run wild. As a puppeteer, my world was of pictures coming to 3D life before your eyes, while others created hilarious characters and bizarre worlds. The project is all spun together in a web that the audience can navigate at their own will and can enter to escape the lockdown fog whenever necessary.

Next, for me keeping theatre alive means developing your practice and I had the phenomenal opportunity to do just that by being part of Emma Rice’s: ‘School for Wise Children Summer Spread’. I received a place on the Movement Direction course via Zoom headed by Etta Murfitt. Coming out of lockdown I think the need to diversify your work and be as multidisciplinary as possible will be paramount to getting employed and surviving, so having this opportunity, time and space to develop my work as a movement director is something I’m incredibly grateful for. A happy surprise presented by lockdown!

Then, Little Angel Theatre is a special place for many; it was one of my first employers when leaving drama school and is an important theatrical corner stone for many schools and children across the country. The theatre receives zero government funding so during lockdown, in both a campaign to get donations but also to continue providing theatre for families, freelancers from LAT were asked to record themselves reading a children’s story for the theatre’s media channels. I had the pleasure of reading ‘The Little Match Stick Girl’ which I enjoyed revisiting immensely. Over lockdown Little Angel have released 18 weeks worth of resources, videos, online puppetry shows, making tutorials, courses and stories – all free to enjoy; an amazing feat to have been a part of.

Lockdown, with its abrupt stopping, has enforced a sense of calm perspective and time to reflect upon your practice as an artist. I’m looking forward to seeing how our industry slowly starts to reopen, as we gradually move out of lockdown and hopefully towards finding a vaccine. Perhaps that’s one last thing lockdown has surprised me with, how artists all over the country have embraced and reignited an open-hearted giving nature towards the work and others… something we can all agree our industry has been well overdue an injection of!

SARITA PLOWMAN is an actress of some 20 years experience.  She has worked in film, television and radio, but mainly in theatre in roles as diverse as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Dormouse in Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  She participated in the Poel Festival of 2004 at Shakespeare’s Globe.

I had the pleasure of stepping into a theatre in July and performing a show I had written and devised with the rest of the cast and performing to nearly 6000(!) school children to celebrate the end of a difficult term.  How was that possible?

The Flying Seagull Project works with varying groups across the world to help bring smiles and happiness to people, whether as Clown Doctors for children undergoing difficult medical treatments or through games, arts, music and crafts workshops and circus shows.  The ‘Spectacular’, the story of a redundant lighthouse keeper who embarks on a highly interactive adventure involving pirates, magic, clowning and music played to sold out audiences in Streatham in 2019.  This time we performed at Applecart Arts Theatre, who have invested in three broadcast quality cameras and microphones to enable theatre to be live streamed in high quality. As soon as we heard about Applecart Arts live streaming service, we jumped on board and began rehearsing a physically distanced version of the show on a rooftop in Soho, determined for as many children as possible to see and experience our magical show!

On the day, we had three camera operators, a sound technician and vision mixer who helped us create an amazing theatrical experience and I would go so far as to say, it felt like we were creating a new genre altogether (a hybrid of theatre and television).        We kept the show interactive by addressing children down the camera and we even included some pre-recorded footage within the live stream as part of the story.  We managed to get a great number of schools on board and played to children in Germany, Argentina and Australia as well as thousands of UK school children who were left without their usual end of term treats.

I am now about to start an open air tour of The Importance of Being Earnest with DOT Productions – this will be physically distanced and the audience is limited capacity and in ‘bubbles’.

Theatre is definitely NOT dead. Most of us storytellers have been beavering away in the background. Stories will always be needed!

Charlotte Gallagher is an actress with experience in theatre, film, television and voice-over.  Here she writes about what she has been doing during the closure of the theatres and the shutdown of film and television production studios.  She also recalls her experience of the Poel Workshop 2017 when Erica Whyman and Paapa Essiedu were among the session leaders, and remarks on the STR’s Covid-19 Support Grants.

Early in lockdown, in a moment of searing carelessness, I suggested to a fellow actor that maybe all we needed to do now was follow Grotowski into the woods and explore what theatre really is. No need for cities, or theatres, or even outside audiences; let’s get pure and poor and holy and frolic in the forest.  In my arboreal whimsy I’d forgotten that this actor had just started running a new West End theatre. His life and dreams were decaying before his eyes. His theatre was and, sadly still is, empty. He was asking the same question in a different tense, how can I keep the theatre alive?

I retreated to the ivory tower safeties of intellectual and philosophical questions about theatre. I love to ask theatre-makers what theatre is and what actors are. Sometimes the answer is given suspiciously with underlined obviousness: “Well, all you need is one person to do something, and one person to watch.” But ask a poet and this is what you get: “Actors are angels. Theatre is the light in the woods” (Glyn Maxwell). Such a poet would host monthly virtual pub and play-reading events to house the swirling grief, fear and joy of this year as if he were the woods himself.

“Maybe there’s no need for us now. We’re not what’s needed now”, one actor said.

Maybe.

And yet I look back and see that I played a lot.

I acted in Shake-scene Shakespeare‘s performances of cue-scripted Shakespeare plays live-streamed to YouTube. (In this method actors study their parts solo and perform the play for the first time in front of an audience. It’s almost the perfect form for this moment and kudos goes to movement director, Alexandra Kataigida, for working out how to fight, kiss, kill and pass props through a zoom box.)

At the Clerkenwell Actor’s Studio we explored Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. And don’t the great plays always manage to speak to and include our present moment? What are we willing to see, to acknowledge, or to ignore? What must be brought to light?

I talked to Galway Theatre Festival instead of performing my new show there. And later in the summer, further up the island, some friends created a new promenade adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for children in the Donegal woods while I played pirates with my toddling niece and nephew. At crisis points in the action (walking the plank, wrestling a crocodile, running away from a monster etc), they would fall down dead with the ‘birus’. In play we invented elaborate, revivifying medicines. They only worked if you administered them exactly the same way every time. I re-read The Way of the Actor by Brian Bates (I’d love to have gone to Rada in the 70s) and enrolled in a shamanic practitioner foundation workshop. I lay down in the beautiful death practice yoga nidra a lot and created my own to share. I comforted myself with thinking: theatre cannot die, it’s part of us, part of our humanity, we’ll always find our way to ritual and to sharing some way, somehow.

But why am I thinking about out-of-work costume-designers making PPE?

And then there was an email from a name I didn’t immediately recognise. Ah yes, vaguely familiar. Yeess. That incredible workshop I did years ago from another time, another world and it was free! And I got to play with Paapa Essiedu and Erica Whyman and loads of amazing people and Sam Yates who, of course, dared to make zoom theatre. They’re offering me financial relief and, if I don’t need it, (I don’t, for the first time in my career I’m perversely grateful for my unsuccess and loyal day job) the opportunity to pass that grant on to my friends who do – to those working actors we see on the telly, at The Globe, or the Nottingham Playhouse for example; we can’t remember their names but they really are extraordinary. These actors, these friends ,email me back to say thank you for passing that on and as I read their messages, impossibly, I sense the unconscious grip in them relaxing. They can get by a little while longer.

Thank you, Society for Theatre Research and the Poel Workshop, for helping to keep theatre alive.