‘Takeaway’ theatre, direct to your doorstep
Inventive actors aren’t letting the closure of theatres hold them back, finds Dominic Cavendish
Shakespeare’s immortal line from As You Like It – “All the world’s a stage” – has acquired a new relevance in the wake of Covid-19. On Sunday afternoon, there’s a loud knock at the door of my house and I get the theatrical equivalent of a “Deliveroo” drop-off.
“Hello,” says a beaming actress, as though this were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve got three speeches in this special Shakespeare edition and you get to choose two of them. What I don’t want to do is tell you what plays they’re from.
“So your options are (a) an explosion of young love (b) a musing on confusing circumstances or (c) a kick-arse lesson in how to stand up for yourself.”
My teenage children – Lucas, 18, Anna, 16 – having loitered in an unpersuaded way in the background, are suddenly intrigued and before you can say “Zounds”, we’ve had a bicker, made our selection and are hanging off the front wall while Lucy Eaton, co-founder of a bespoke theatre service called Revels in Hand, gives an open-air masterclass in how to do a vertical take-off performance.
Sans warm-up, make-up, anything save her own skill, she transports us to Verona and Illyria – impassioned as Juliet, incredulous as Viola, giving a contextual explainer each time. It’s a surreal scene – passers-by do double-takes – but she’s so immersed in the moment that our collective self-consciousness evaporates.
A round of applause and Eaton is on her way, pausing to reflect that, “It was a more nerve-racking performance than usual because it’s so intimate but way nicer than an audition speech. I enjoyed it – I didn’t feel judged, I could sense you were all excited.” I was left wanting more, my daughter admitted she thought it was going to be cringey, but not a bit of it (“She was so confident and relaxed”) and my son said: “I really wasn’t sure what to expect but we all went with it.”
I’m lucky. That was, in fact, my second bespoke theatrical experience of the weekend. The afternoon before, I visited the backyard of a terraced house in Stratford, east London in the (suitably distanced) company of four other spectators. Bard from the Yard is a new 45-minute solo that sees Shakespeare himself turn up on your doorstep, trot out some of his greatest speeches and confide his plague-quarantined writer’s block.
The mock-biographical element is entertainingly well handled (by writer/ director Victoria Baumgartner). The piece is delivered to perfection here by Jonathan Blakeley, one of a 20-strong pool of performers dispatched across London according to the locality
(yet more are coming on stream outside the capital). Watching an actor shape-shift between roles
(by turns Puck, Romeo, Richard II) is a blissful reminder of the joy of live professional performance.
Revels in Hand are harking back to the days when players could be invited (or rather commanded) to perform in private before crown and nobility – very much a feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean society.
Bard in the Yard glances at the needs-must tradition of actors roving the countryside when the playhouses were closed by plague (it’s possible
Shakespeare himself joined the King’s Men on tour). These initiatives represent the entrepreneurial fightback of an industry that has faced devastation as a result of the pandemic. We are finally seeing green shoots of recovery – the Government ordained the resumption (with social distancing) of open-air theatre on July 11, and has also announced that performances can take place indoors from Aug 1, subject to further testing and measures to safeguard against Covid-19. Next month will see two outdoor theatre festivals (one in Wandsworth in south London, the other in Cirencester) and a reprise of
Jesus Christ Superstar at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre. And new events are cropping up all the time. But the idea of taking theatre into gardens (current guidelines allow a maximum of 30 people for private homes) feels like a grassroots revolution.
For Baumgartner, who pulled the Bard in the Yard project together in six weeks, the sky’s the limit in terms of potential demand and supply. Albeit the weather will be more problematic come the autumn, the show is so portable and inexpensive it could move indoors to a socially distanced auditorium. “We got 500 actor applications on the back of our first Tweet – an incredible number,” she says. Some 160 were auditioned, and the chosen candidates were rehearsed remotely, in groups.
For Blakeley, possibly giving London’s first bona fide live performance post lockdown, the experience was a boon, regardless of the financial recompense.
“There’s only so much learning the piano, exercising, daily walking, Zoom quizzing and trying to eat well you can do to keep lockdown anxiety and the fear of your industry falling apart from the forefront of your mind,” he tells me. “To get back to doing what I love and hold dear was amazing.”
This kind of theatre may not come cheap (Bard in the Yard costs over £100, and Revels in Hand’s flying visit begins at £50) but compared to West End prices that still qualifies as a bargain and it’s hard to begrudge actors willing to speechify for their supper some relief from straitened circumstances.
What’s more, those companies already adept at small-scale touring are the ones most able to adapt now that the landscape has changed.
Actor and producer Giles Shenton has a portable one-man version of Three Men in A Boat which, when done with minimal set, wouldn’t capsize the family budget (about £150). He and fellow members of Kick in the Head productions are tapping the emerging market with a portal called theatre2u.co.uk, offering an à la carte selection, whether it be other solo theatre shows, a West End and Broadway hits cabaret, an audience with an actor (like The Voice finalist Leanne Jarvis, Hollyoaks regular Sarah Jane Buckley) or a Led Zeppelin tribute (a pricier proposition – in the region of £1,500 – if done to the hilt, but perhaps just what would galvanise a community; the company can branch out to bigger spaces, even fields, if required.
“If you use your imagination there are spaces everywhere,” Shenton says. Aside from needing to assess the practicality of each space prior to a confirmed booking and needing a lavatory for the performers’ use, the show requirements are remarkably few. As and when theatres reopen these quirky, on-demand, organic activities could endure, as well as paving the way for a confident return to the playhouses.
“I think audiences are scared of coming back to the theatre,” Baumgartner says. “We are all going to have to rethink that relationship. What we’re doing here is like an act of re-wooing – it’s as if we’re taking theatregoers out on their first date.”
For more information visit bardintheyard.co.uk, revelsinhand.com and theatre2u.co.uk
We hang off my front wall and watch Lucy perform a passionate speech