Yesterday I had a lovely, long-overdue chat with a good friend.
Unusually for me, not a theatre friend and we haven’t spoken with words throughout the whole COVID shenanigans.
So we asked each other, “How was it for you?” though both being fully aware that we are not yet at the point of reviewing the entire pandemic experience. I see no fat lady singing so this certainly is not over.
We did the school chat and the singing chat, which is where our worlds collide, and we did the family niceties and we laughed and sympathised and all that, and then I found myself saying something that I didn’t even know I thought.
Isn’t that what therapy is like? So, yes, talk to old slightly-out-of-touch friends…but that’s not the point.
Here is the think that I thunked and then said.
I have begun to forget that I miss theatre. It’s begun to feel like something that I used to do and I have almost, just a little bit, started to stop caring that it seems to be lost.
When I wrote last year’s World Theatre Day blog none of us had any idea where we would be today. It had a kind of optimistic tone and a cheery gung-ho vibe. Hmmm…
For Corkscrew over this mad year, we have fiddled with a radio play or two and were amazingly lucky to be able to squeeze in a lovely outdoor piece between lockdowns (have a look at The Happy Prince pictures) and we are working on a grim Grimm story online.
We zoomed and we pondered and future planning ideas started to end with the decision to NOT get excited or put dates in diaries.
Yesterday evening, still pondering what I had voiced to my friend, I decided to give Netflix a break and watch some real theatre online. I chose Mosquitoes – a Lucy Kirkwood play, Rufus Norris direction, National Theatre, Olivias Colman and Williams – so that’s a good start.
Set in 2008 and in Geneva when the Large Hadron Collider started up and some of us, possibly the same ones who think that the vaccine is a microchip implant, thought that the world would be sucked into a black hole.
Good play, recommend. Made me want to be there. Tick.
I guess there are signs of optimism. I hope that the struggle of all the luvvies of the world will soon be over. I’m sad for the bits that will inevitably lost for ever but I know that there is passion and drive for us all to make the ultimate come back someday soon.
I’ll watch another play this evening in honour of World Theatre Day. I’m not sure it will be enough to completely fix me just yet but it might just keep me out of a black hole until I can be in a black box.