Boris Johnson has today announced a delay to full reopening in England, an increasingly inexorable decision that prompted headlines last week when Andrew Lloyd Webber said that he’d rather go to jail than delay the reopening of his theatres. Here’s all you need to know about the current situation.
Aren’t theatres already open again? What’s the story here?
Like cinemas, theatres have been able to reopen with social distancing since May 17. However, many shows and theatres had been holding off their reopening until after June 21, because the 50 percent capacity cap required by social distancing would cause many shows to lose money. This is more of a problem for commercial producers (ie the West End) who haven’t been able to access the same amount of government support that subsidised theatres have.
So how prepared are London’s theatres for a month’s delay to full reopening?
As a rule, they’re really well prepared. Some shows – notably ‘Under Milk Wood’ and ‘After Life’ at the National Theatre – will remain socially distanced throughout their runs regardless. Many others took to heart the government advice that June 21 was not set in stone and have adopted a ‘suck it and see’ approach, wherein they have plans to raise the capacity and put more tickets on sale, but will only do when they’re officially allowed to. And many of the bigger West End shows – be it classics like ‘Les Mis’ and ‘Hamilton’ or newies like ‘Frozen’ and ‘Back to the Future’ – have cautiously held their openings back until the end of the summer, or even further.
Okay, so it’s not a big deal?
Theatres have had a terrible pandemic, and another month of diminished income will be a real kick in the teeth, while delays of much longer than a month would potentially cause very serious problems across the board. However, in a prosaic sense: almost everybody was prepared for a delay.
Did Andrew Lloyd Webber not say that he would be prepared to go to prison rather than not open his theatres at full capacity?
Yes, he did say that. His new musical ‘Cinderella’ and his old musical ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ are both scheduled to start performances within the period of delay, and neither is selling socially distanced tickets. Lloyd Webber has maintained that he will sue the government to allow them to open, and whatever the outcome of said suing he will open them anyway, going to jail if need be.
Wow. Er, does he have a case?
He has famously spent a lot of money tricking out his theatres with god-tier air filtration systems and self-sterilising doorhandles and whatnot. A recent UCL study has found that capacity theatres are safe for masked audiences so long as correct safety measures are observed. But it seems enormously unlikely that the government would allow exceptions to be made to its rules on a piecemeal basis, as everybody else would feel they had a case. Maybe in the future a building’s individual safety measures will be considered, but that’s simply not how the rules currently work.
So what is going to happen?
Lloyd Webber did leave some wiggle room to back down in his interview by saying he’d be prepared to accept some form of compensation. But if that doesn’t happen, he has literally stated that he will keep his theatres open at full capacity in defiance of the law. There are many, many questions around this: notably, who actually attends an illegal Andrew Lloyd Webber show? Would the cast and crew also be prepared to defy the law? Is it really worth all this fuss over a few weeks’ delay? Compromising by either postponing the shows or reducing their capacity for the first few weeks is so sensible it almost feels inevitable, but Lloyd Webber said what he said. Basically he’s either going to take it on the chin and we’ll probably barely remember this delay in future months, or he’ll go down in flames with such pyrotechnic intensity that we’ll remember it as his worst ever idea, even more so than that musical he did about The Troubles with Ben Elton.
‘Cinderella’ is due to start performances on Jun 25. ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ is due to start performances Jul 1.
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