British theatre will need some form of government intervention during the coronavirus crisis before venues can reopen, the actor David Tennant has said.
Theatres closed abruptly in March and many in the industry fear they will not be able to reopen properly until 2021.
In an interview with this week’s Radio Times, Tennant said one of the biggest issues is about audience safety. “You’re asking people to pay a lot of money to potentially have someone coughing into their packet of boiled sweets and infecting them,” he said.
“I don’t know what the answer is yet. It’s urgent, because the performing arts in this country don’t exist with huge profit margins.”
A handful of theatres, including the Nuffield in Southampton, have already gone bust and there are warnings that 70% of theatres will run out of money by the end of the year.
The West End producer Sonia Friedman has said the performing arts face “the real possibility of complete obliteration” without substantial government support, while the director Sam Mendes said “an ecosystem this intricate and evolved cannot be rebuilt from scratch”.
Tennant said some theatres were “teetering”. He added: “We’ll need government intervention until theatres can safely reopen, and audiences are happy to go back.”
The government has set up a cultural renewal taskforce to help map a course out of the lockdown, but arts leaders say the solution must involve investment.
The culture secretary Oliver Dowden said on Monday he was involved in “intricate discussions” with the Treasury and suggested a deal was almost done.
He told the London Evening Standard: “I am not going to stand by and see our world-leading position in arts and culture destroyed.
“Of course I want to get the money flowing, I am not going to let anyone down.”
Tennant stars with Michael Sheen in a lockdown comedy for the BBC titled Staged, in which they play actors who had been due to open in a new West End production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Their director suggests they continue rehearsals through lockdown on Zoom. The show also features their real-life partners, Tennant’s wife, Georgia Moffett, and Sheen’s partner, Anna Lundberg, both actors.
Casting existing pairs of actor partners in shows is being discussed as a possible way of working within the rules of social distancing, and Tennant said he was in favour.
He said: “It would be great. We’d have to all isolate together for rehearsals. And we’d need a lot of childcare for when we were on stage.”
