When theatres were forced to close their doors because of the coronavirus outbreak, set designs were left intact in empty auditoriums. The Royal Court in London has hit upon an intriguing idea to enable the public to virtually visit its Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, which shut during the run of EV Crowe’s play Shoe Lady starring Katherine Parkinson. Caretaker, a durational installation created by the artist Hester Chillingworth, will now run online until the theatre can invite audiences back into the building.
Caretaker, which “opens” on the Royal Court’s website on Friday at 7.30pm, is a livestream of the theatre’s uninhabited main stage, with intermittently broadcast “witty, playful and supportive audio messages” accompanying the Shoe Lady set. The play had a design by Chloe Lamford that featured a central conveyor belt, which Parkinson – playing the stressed Viv, who loses a shoe on her commute – walked along.
Chillingworth said the Caretaker project was about finding “new ways of watching and being together or being alone” during the lockdown. “I’ve been exploring ways to make performances with nobody in for a while now, because I’m really bothered about the assumptions and judgments we project on to bodies when we see them. When lockdown hit it felt to me that we were communally feeling the value and limits of bodies in a renewed way, and that absence was suddenly very present with us all.”
On 16 March, the Royal Court cancelled the remaining dates for Shoe Lady as well as its future productions. Vicky Featherstone, its artistic director, said: “Hester approached us a few weeks ago with this beautiful idea, an offering, somewhere to think and to look at our empty space.”
