Before this torch is lit, the sheer scale of the devastation this disease has wrought must be faced. Deemed ineligible for JobKeeper, most workers employed in the industry were simply cut off, both from their livelihoods and from the artistic practice that gives artists’ lives meaning. As Arts Centre Melbourne’s CEO Claire Spencer puts it: ‘As an arts administrator, every ounce of your being is about getting shows on, and getting audiences in, so to take the decision to close, every cell in your body is screaming at you that it’s the wrong thing to do.’ On 15 March 2020, the Arts Centre did just that, closing Volt, the terrific triple bill from Australian Ballet, and Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Saigon, one of the richest and most memorable productions we’ve seen from the Asia TOPA Festival. ‘It was heartbreaking. It was the only decision to make but it was so counter-intuitive,’ Spencer says, the inflection of grief still present in her voice almost a year on.

There is a palpable sense of anger there, too. Programmers watched in March, along with the rest of the country, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison listed sector after sector that would be receiving government support, without once mentioning the arts – as if an entire economic ecosystem, and the central pillar of our cultural identity, simply didn’t exist. Spencer sounds almost resigned in response: ‘None of us were really surprised, which is the sad thing.’ When asked how she felt about the arts being locked out of JobKeeper, she is as direct as the CEO of a major arts organisation can be. ‘I felt profoundly disappointed, but also fortunate we are in Victoria, where the state government has a different view of the value of creative industries.’

Brett Sheehy, the departing artistic director of Melbourne Theatre Company, doesn’t hold back either. ‘I’ve been doing jobs similar to this for a couple of decades. It was the worst working experience of my life.’ He had to contact 161 artists and tell them the work he had engaged them to do in 2020 had to be cancelled, and that there was little the company could do financially to help them survive the year. ‘Dispiritedness’ is the word he uses. ‘The arts weren’t being mentioned anywhere in government; it wasn’t an industry even worth mentioning, let alone saving’ – all this while households around the nation ‘immediately turned to art – streaming, music, Netflix – without realising that everything that lifted their spirits, and from a mental health perspective literally saved lives, came from artists.’

While this bitterness might take longer than expected to subside, every programmer in the country is focused on the future, on how they can ensure people’s safety and excite them about the ongoing potential of the medium. In some ways, this has meant a rethinking of the role of the programmer and of the relationship between artist and audience. For Zohar Spatz, incoming artistic director of Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre Company, the lockdowns of 2020 enabled a re-evaluation of priorities. ‘A twenty-first-century, post-Covid world is going to need people to think about social value and sustainability, and I believe we [the company and the arts in general] can assist in nurturing creative thinking and empathy.’ Spatz sees a move away from ‘transactional experiences’ towards something ‘that makes people feel they’re a part of a community.’

Where fiscal restraint and rationalisation could be an expected response from the industry, La Boite is opting instead for radical investment, recently unveiling a new ‘artists company’ comprising twenty-two actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and technicians, who will collaborate on a slate of upcoming works. ‘We didn’t want to become a theatre company full of administrators. This way, we’ve become a company full of creative thinkers and makers.’ Spatz talks convincingly of La Boite as a home for artists, particularly local ones, and as a direct response to interstate travel restrictions amid a series of border closures, but also as a way of fostering ‘the ecology of the artistic sector’.

Another incoming artistic director, Lee Lewis – who assumed the reins at Queensland Theatre from Sam Strong in early 2020 – is just as mindful of the duty of care programmers have to the artistic communities from which they draw their talent and inspiration. To this end, she has programmed an entire year of productions, many of them with large casts. ‘We wanted to give opportunities to as many artists as possible, not just those we’d already commissioned in 2020. That was the thinking behind shows with larger casts.’ One of the biggest will be the première of the theatrical adaptation of Trent Dalton’s 2018 novel Boy Swallows Universe, a huge co-production with Brisbane Festival in association with QPAC. It is what Lewis describes as ‘playing chicken with a very big financial truck’, but it also represents that sense of hope, an expansiveness after a year of dearth. This full year of programming with ambitious large-scale work is, she admits, ‘largely a confidence exercise’.

Malthouse Theatre has also opted for radical optimism, mounting a single production of a new play – programmed, depending on the box office, to run over many months – that is unlike anything the company has attempted in the past. Because the Night is an interactive, multi-disciplinary work based on Hamlet (but set in a rural Australian town facing the collapse of its timber industry) that renders the Malthouse complex’s two main stage theatres, the Merlyn and the Beckett, unrecognisable. Thirty separate but interconnected rooms have been built, and two separate casts and crews employed, in what artistic director Matthew Lutton says is a direct response to Covid. ‘Because the Night is only possible because of the pandemic. We wouldn’t have thought of a show that engaged audiences in this way without this, shall we say, unfortunate prompt.’ One of the reasons for this is the limited number of people who can participate at any given time: only sixty tickets are sold for each performance. ‘It’s very much designed with social distancing in mind. In fact it’s become a creative parameter; it’s determined the architecture and the ways in which an audience might move about in it.’

If this notion feels familiar, it might be because it recalls UK company Punchdrunk’s famous site-specific hit, Sleep No More (2011), set in the abandoned McKittrick Hotel in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Lutton acknowledges the influence, even while pointing out that this show is text based, entirely original, and will no doubt fold the global trauma of Covid into its dramatic design.

Not everyone is taking the high-risk approach of La Boite and Malthouse. Spencer says that ‘although your instinct is just to open all the doors at once and tell people to come on in’, the larger organisations can’t as readily do this. Arts Centre Melbourne’s strategy is to reopen gradually and purposefully. ‘We started by opening our café “The Protagonist” out the front of the building. Then we opened the [Sidney Myer Music] Bowl. Then the indoor venues will start to come back online.’ If this seems cautious, it is largely a question of contingencies, because ‘you have to build in flexibility, and allow room for change or disruption. You can’t do that if you’re running everything at full pelt.’

The level of confidence companies have in reopening depends largely on their location. Sydney Theatre Company mounted its first post-Covid show in September 2020, Angus Cerini’s Wonnangatta, and have since produced a hit production of The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Eryn Jean Norvill, premièred Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s 1980 time-travel novel Playing Beatie Bow, and renovated its Wharf Theatre. Executive director Patrick McIntyre says the September opening was ‘important because we wanted to be there for the people who wanted us to be there. We felt, weirdly, that we were a part of a historical moment that people would remember. A moment we wanted to mark, in a way.’ This comment is echoed by Lewis, who called her first show ‘a light at the end of a global tunnel’.

One of the greatest dilemmas that has faced programmers – and an area with clear ideological disparity in the approaches taken – is the issue of reprogramming: how do you balance the natural inclination to mount works that were cancelled in 2020, as a way of honouring a commitment to the artists involved, with a desire to tell stories that speak directly to a changed world? If companies stage pre-pandemic work, does this represent a capitulation to the idea of theatre as a moribund art form; on the other hand, if they scrap that work entirely, what message does this send to the artists? It is a dilemma with no easy answers.

Queensland Theatre have brought back a number of shows scheduled for 2020, including Boy Swallows Universe (‘We had to bring that one back. It’s a celebration of our capacity as a theatre company to do a work of that scale’), along with plays like Anchuli Felicia King’s provocative and whip-smart White Pearl and Suzie Miller’s searing Prima Facie, which, if anything, feel more relevant one year on. At Sydney Theatre Company, all but one of the shows cancelled in 2020 will return in 2021. ‘Some of those shows were already in rehearsal and ready to go on stage,’ McIntyre says. ‘Others had sets that were designed and half built and partially rehearsed. It made sense to retain the work that had already been done, not to mention the money that had already been spent.’

In stark contrast, Malthouse Theatre is reviving none of its cancelled shows. Lutton can ‘foresee there are works we cancelled last year that will return, in 2022 and 2023. But we also have to take into account that those years will be very different to 2020. We have to make sure that what is being programmed are the works of greatest urgency and not museum pieces.’ Theatre has often struggled with this concept of relevance, increasingly so in the age of social media and screen culture, an underlying fear that it may have become a repository for dead ideas. The pandemic – what amounts to a long suppression of the art form itself – seems to have sharpened the consternation.

At Arts Centre Melbourne, Spencer is adamant that none of the shows we will see this year are repeats from a cancelled season. ‘Collectively, we couldn’t think of any projects that are going ahead in 2021 that are a direct reprogramming from 2020.’ Which isn’t to say they are starting from scratch. ‘Artists are incredible in the way they can adapt; they can look at a situation and shift. So even though their project may have been announced, it can still be reimagined and presented in a very different way than when the idea was first conceived.’ Although the majority of artists whose shows were cancelled in 2020 will be returning, the shows they mount will, for the most part, be unrecognisable. ‘Born in a Taxi is a company that had a performance planned for the forecourt of the theatres’ building. That’s been completely changed. They’re now doing roving zebras at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.’

Sheehy thinks this reconfiguration is perfectly natural, and a healthy resetting of the theatrical imagination. ‘Everything is going to have to be put through a lens of social relevance. All of us programming around the country will be more conscious of the work being relevant to the times.’ MTC’s return to the main stage, Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a charged exploration of power, gender, and sexual politics, is a case in point. ‘We have had two incontrovertible lines in the sand drawn in our culture within three years – Harvey Weinstein was the first, and George Floyd was the second – and neither of them have anything to do with Covid.’ It’s a reminder that, while the pandemic has ground the theatres to a halt, it won’t ultimately define the times. The great social revolutions underpinning the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter will have a far greater impact on theatre’s future concerns.

As for the kind of theatre that will attract people emerging from lockdown, it seems there is no easy answer there either, other than the sense that the pandemic will not become an organising principle. Sheehy remembers the conversations at MTC around this very point. ‘Should the work we do interrogate deeply the idea of isolation, of separateness? Or should we go the other way and program work that’s uplifting and hopeful?’ A survey of subscribers drew thousands of responses. The overwhelming consensus was ‘to do what we’ve always done. Give us the finest comedy, the deepest tragedy. Give us work that challenges us.’

Spatz found something similar when she orchestrated a kind of theatrical outreach program at La Boite, where company members directly called audiences, not just current subscribers, ‘but also those we may have lost along the way. What better time than lockdown to have sixty-minute, one-on-one conversations with audiences?’ The results were galvanising. ‘We have a very young audience – most of them under thirty-five – and it was fascinating asking them what they wanted to see.’ Like the MTC audiences, they weren’t prescriptive; they didn’t cite particular writers or show a preference for specific genres. What they wanted was ‘to be part of something bigger, part of a bigger conversation, part of a community.’ Overall, they ‘want to see theatre that reflects what is impacting them right now’. The cancellation rather than mere postponement of their 2020 season means that La Boite’s slate of new work ‘will, by definition, be dynamic and relevant. I’m excited because what will come out of La Boite in the next few years will be vital theatre.’

As for the ‘pandemic play’ – the piece of theatre that deals directly with Covid, its scale and its impact – are programmers anticipating or dreading it? Lutton is ‘not very interested in seeing a pandemic play that is mere mimicry, that simply plays out what we’ve all just experienced. I’m more interested in theatre that looks at the core undercurrents of the pandemic and finds creative solutions.’ Lewis, too, is far more interested in the idea of the indirect pandemic piece; she mentions two twentieth-century works that dealt with global trauma, in this case the horrors of war, in ways both subtle and subversive. ‘Noël Coward’s Hay Fever [1925] is a play totally informed by post-traumatic stress disorder. There are only old and young men in that play, and the millions killed in the war are tellingly absent. The comedy of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is only possible when your audience has gone through that very direct trauma. They were sitting in the rubble of Berlin [in 1949] watching that play.’

Perhaps this is the key to Shapiro’s point about plague and the Elizabethans: how much of the dread in Macbeth, the malignancy of Iago, and the Grand Guignol of Titus Andronicus is a manifestation of the collective grief of a society where people were literally dying in the streets? Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet depicts the creation of Hamlet as an elegy to the son Shakespeare lost to the disease. As Lewis says, ‘It doesn’t have to be about Covid to be about Covid.’ McIntyre reminds us that ‘it doesn’t even have to be current. Great writers have looked back to the past to illuminate the present, to show us the world is connected not just through space but through time.’ It is the method Arthur Miller would use to such chilling effect in The Crucible (1953).

If theatre does respond directly to the pandemic, in the way that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1999) did to the AIDS crisis, it seems unlikely to be soon. The fear will naturally subside as theatregoing begins to feel normal again, but the trauma will linger and seep through our creative output for years to come. In this way, theatre can be an act of communion, something ritualistic and ultimately healing. As Lewis expresses it, ‘art is intrinsically linked to the health of the cities. When the audience breathes, so the city breathes.’  True, but as Lutton says, ‘culturally we’re in shock and shock needs to be processed’.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.