The 7 Stages of Grief - Covid style

Over the past few days, my timeline appears to be flooded with people in our industry genuinely struggling and feeling afraid for their future. The human cost of COVID is heartbreaking, the emotional cost of the pandemic though would have changed the lives of millions forever.

In many ways COVID was the great equaliser, regardless of our careers to date in the industry this microscopic germ floored us all from producers to runners, from the established stars to the new graduates, suddenly the playing field was level. However, that in itself has transpired to be unsettling.

1) SHOCK AND DISBELIEF

For the first few weeks, we were all in shock and huddled indoors reeling at the fact that our lives had turned into a SciFi movie, suddenly we were all extras in Russell T Davies' Years and Years, a programme that we'd all admired for its exceptional writing and exquisite performances by top-rate performers, yet suddenly like all of the people involved in that show, we too were all suddenly at ground zero.

I don't think that anybody in their wildest dreams could have envisaged a time when every theatre in the world would go dark?  It's no wonder we survived the first month. We were too numb to do anything else

2) DENIAL

Then came the posts where people declared cheerfully that this was almost a good thing as it would allow all of us to stop being defined by our careers after all this was an industry that had been bleeding us dry for years anyway, so we'd been given the opportunity to reboot 'life'.  A few people put out content, but the majority either stayed silent or felt the need to explain to everybody why they weren't able to put out content. Of course, in reality, we were all attempting to deal with the reality in whatever way we could. It was actually called survival, not creation.  Shows started to stream and we all bathed in the reflected glory of our friends in these shows. There were beginning to be some pluses to this mess after all. Free theatre to the masses - it was the socialist dream realised, and as we all know, most of our industry love the idea of a free theatre (even if we've failed to make it a viable concern as we've also all wanted a fair salary for the work that we do too). 

3) GUILT

However as the weeks turned to months and things slowly restarted our industry, the industry that we all believed was so vital to the health of our nation suddenly didn't matter.  Our fans appetite was being sufficiently sated by the online streaming going on, yet as Joe Public sat and enjoyed the performances, the performers and technicians were just stuck at home, not earning and not even hearing the applause that was no doubt going on in various places around the country. That same applause that actually seems to lift us up regardless of our mood, the sound that generally speaking makes us feel worthy. Self-validation is vital but the sound of applause is something different isn't it? The joy of watching our friends had somehow turned hollow and we were simply being reminded of what we had lost. We don't talk about this much but let's face it, the sound of strangers appreciating our work is the greatest drug of all. A drug that lifts us up when we feel like life is hard, that gives us an adrenaline rush so massive that many performers feel the need to artificially recreate its effects long after the curtain has come down. Well, times were certainly hard, and our 'drug of choice' just wasn't available anywhere, more than that it was now against the guidance of the government to partake in it.

4) ANGER AND BARGAINING 

As 1 month turned into 3 months and there was still no real sign of recovery for our sector, and with so many people financially struggling having fallen down the massive cracks that the treasury had created in its DIY fix of the economic crises that was the secondary disease that the country was attempting to fight, you could see people on social media losing themselves more and more.

An appallingly unjust death in the States provided the release that everybody needed.  Finally, there was a worthwhile cause to utilise all the anger and feelings of injustice that we had all been feeling. Of course, we couldn't get that angry for our own issues, as part of the problem with a global pandemic is everybody understands on one level that we actually don't know where to place the blame that we're so desperate to park up. Where do you locate the anger? We were finally able to truly bargain an explanation out of this mess. We might have felt like we were lost, but some much needed social change could grow from this anger.  This was our chance to turn the nightmare into something positive. It was like releasing the steam from a pressure cooker for a cause that most people had no doubt believed in over the years (as that is the white privileged position of choosing when to get involved in the fight for equality)

Suddenly years of niggles about everything rather unfairly in many ways diluted the main fight, relegating it some 4 months on to a well-intentioned occasional social media post again as we all got swept away into a tsunami of what felt like validated pain. 

Now that the anger was being released we got angry about literally everything and we made sure that everybody heard us (all with the hashtag #bekind). We were angry at people putting content out, we got angry at people putting positive messages out, we were angry at people saying that they were struggling, we were angry at the other industries starting back, we turned on each other as we couldn't actually scream at patient zero, the person who unwittingly started off this catastrophic chain reaction. We couldn't sit with the anger of a pandemic as that was too huge, so we turned to the minutiae of life and suddenly shouted about all the little (but important) things that have impacted us during our lives. Things that under normal circumstances we would have brushed off by now, but with nothing else to focus on for months it was time to revisit them and shout about it. We couldn't get positive strokes from an audience, but we could get a social media validation for our feelings online.

5) DEPRESSION

We've shouted and screamed albeit it virtually, in a bid to be seen and remind people that we exist as an industry, yet we've wept when we've seen the outside of the theatres converted into outside dining areas for a hospitality trade that had been suffering every bit as hard as us, but who were already permitted to go back to work. Talk about salt in the wounds.

The inevitable loss of jobs has been hard-hitting, literally every day an announcement about a theatre or a company that has had no choice but to make sweeping redundancies in the hope that this will save their business from going under. We've wept for the buildings and our memories in them, and we've wept for the people that are left stranded out in the street, weaponised with an enviable skill set but for an industry that doesn't exist.

We hear a lot about people thinking that they should retrain and move onto something else. I mean the industry has never been easy anyway, you could be waiting years for a job (literally). However, that was manageable (just) when there were clearly jobs happening. You could see the 'dream' happening for others every single day, and for many, that's enough to keep going for. If it could happen for 'them' it could happen for 'you', you've just got to hold tight and survive until it was your turn. Now though it was nobody's turn. We weren't even seeing 'what we could have won'. 

We hit the depression stage with a thud. This is different to clinical depression, it's a feeling of abject loneliness looking into an abyss, even when you're surrounded by your loved ones.  Suddenly this all feels far too big, and we are all left feeling so small and insignificant. The public are getting on with things and we've turned into Mr Cellophane. 

There are very few people in our industry that have not been told by somebody in their lives that what we do is just a hobby. I've been a professional musician for 36 years and my father still wants me to get a proper job. Suddenly the government's response to our sector has felt like every bad taxi ride conversation we've ever had.

6) RECONSTRUCTION AND WORKING THROUGH

Some 4 months later we were permitted to do outside performances. Producers and performers alike were quick to seize on this glimmer of hope. Would people want to come back to the theatre again? Had they missed us? Shows were slowly emerging, filming had restarted, jobs were appearing. Finally, theatres could open again, of course not like before, but open to try and work out how to survive this mid pandemic limbo that we find ourselves in. 

So I guess that's where lots of people are right now, which is why it's particularly tough. In order to work through this period, we're all going to have to adjust what our plans were. A temporary career to financially see us through this period? Possibly retraining in something to build up a skillset in another area. Of course, lots of us have said for years that this would have been a good idea, suddenly though it's the only idea. That's rather scary when you know that you're only really good at the one thing. . . our industry.

We are a vocational industry, our work defines us just like we define our work. That's not to say that the industry is driving us to early graves and abusing us along the way, for so many of us this is our hobby as well as our career. I don't know much about civvy street, maybe bankers feel the same about their job - though I suspect not.

We've always been the outsiders that somehow found our 'tribes'. This alone made us feel safe and contained even without putting a show into the mix. It's hard to feel the benefit of that tribe when everyone is struggling at the same time. You see it online - who's going to pick who up today?

7) ACCEPTANCE 

Well right now this is the aim I guess. We get on with doing whatever we need to do to survive, breathe and just know that in time theatre will return. Fast forward a few years and we might be able to look back on this disaster as a catalyst for real meaningful change in the world, and if we can't then I guess we just have to accept the fact that we tried, and we tried whilst surviving the most bizarre thing imaginable.

It's important to go through a process to survive this period as best that we can. We were right to be numb, sad, angry, bitter, remorseful, optimistic . . . just 'being' right now is enough. Suddenly we are all survivors

Out of Control

As we're about to enter another milestone in the Pandemic lockdown, so it seems that the conspiracy theories and speculation about what the future will look like spread quicker than the virus itself.

In the past few days alone I've heard how we're all being brainwashed by the mainstream media (or MSM as the enlightened few all seem to call it - which is ironic as that acronym alone sounds like some dodgy news channel), I've read articles both quoting and misquoting the 'people in the know' as they've fundamentally hypothesised about what the future might look at, as I've read the threads of people's reactions to these hypotheses as though they were now facts.

Similarly, I've read the opinions from my industry peers - the optimistic chant of "we'll be back stronger than before after all theatre always survives" being seen in equal measure to the "this is the death of theatre as we know it". The headlines telling us almost daily that a vaccination or a treatment is seemingly days from being mass-produced to the headlines telling us that a vaccination or treatment will never be found for this constantly mutating virus.

Right now we have a Prime Minister speaking on Wednesday in Parliament stating he's about to start to 'unlock' the lockdown almost like a trailer for his much-publicised televised speech this weekend, yet on Thursday, one day later, Scotland declared that they wouldn't be changing anything soon, quickly followed by the Boris dep of the day telling all of us during the daily briefing to not change anything until Boris says so, followed on Friday, just 2 days later, by Senedd Cymru declaring that they weren't really changing anything either.  It's like we're suddenly in the middle of a game of Boris says but they forgot to tell us the rules, scrap that, it's like they forgot to tell Boris the rules!

In other words - the world is suddenly very confusing. We're all trying to work out in the first place who to believe. We've watched the mainstream media and noted how it's not actually covering some of the horror that UK people are living through whilst gleefully giving us a good news story every day, so we've glanced at the right & left-wing propaganda in a bid for clarity, come up with a few theories of our own based on a hunch and ended up exactly where we started. . . nowhere.

So we start to look closer to home as the global picture is too vast to comprehend.  We look to our friends and families but of course, relationships are complex at the best of times. So it's somewhat alarming to see how our peers and families are dealing with the current uncertainty, plus of course, there's a strong chance that we're physically separated at the moment from our 'go-to' people. The friends and families that can talk us down when things are feeling huge. Even worse than that lots of people are locked-in with the people that pander to our acting out giving us tacit permission to be 'however' we need to be without challenging us whilst thinking that they're helping us. I would suggest that a room full of 'yes people' is exactly why we're in the mess that we're in right now. Not being challenged and binary thinking helps nobody to evolve.

For a lot of people in our industry our work also tends to be an anchor during stormy seas - but now the unthinkable has happened, the show just didn't go on. It literally stopped overnight.

Or to put all of this another way, our lives are no longer within our own control. I can't go back to work until the government tells me that I can. I can't go to my 'escape' - the theatre until the government tells the industry that we can re-open.  So whilst we're essentially freer than ever before - no time restraints for anything, we are of course straitjacketed by the pandemic.

So we speculate.

We each have a different approach to trauma - which after all, that's exactly what this is for all of us. Some people like to look at the worst-case scenario and then be pleasantly surprised when things don't end up so bad, some people need to be eternally optimistic about the future, refusing to see any liquid left in the glass at all, let alone leaving us with a glass half empty. Then there are all the people straddling optimism and pessimism in equal measure and who enjoy exploring that dichotomy aloud.

The thing that we never take into account though is how everybody else is hearing 'our process', and indeed what is the agenda of our public statements (sometimes known, sometimes subconscious)  Throw into that mix a health mix of social media bots and aggravators and we're in a heady mix of chaos right now. 

Somebody throws out their 'theory' or speculates on when the theatres will be up and running and literally everybody jumps on it. Either doing the 'I knew it' line, or doing the 'how dare you write this down line'. Yet for all the 'noise' out there (and boy is there a lot at the moment), you'll always find an opinion or a piece of speculation that will fit your current thinking, allow you to think that somebody somewhere does know what's going to happen next, and therefore you throw your social media support behind them.

The truth is scarier right now though. None of us can predict the answer. None of us truly know whether people will flock back to the theatres relieved to finally get that escape, or whether they'll stay away in their droves. We don't know if 'normality' will happen this year, next year or indeed if we'll need to adjust to a different normal from before. Already I find myself being caught off guard if I see people on the TV greeting each other with any sort of physical contact. Suddenly a handshake seems like a daring move, yet just 2 months ago this was my regular greeting and had been my entire adult life

So I guess that's the crux of it, isn't it? We will all adjust. Life (for the majority of us) will continue and we'll learn to adapt. In order to preserve our sanity maybe that's enough of a surety to help us see our way through the chaos?

Competition - the Pandemic Way

In my recent blog about finding myself in charge of an online college I confessed to never having had a pandemic plan up my sleeve on the off chance that one day the world would suddenly be in lockdown. Of course, hindsight is everything. It's easy to regret decisions made before a global event. Strange to think that from now on a couple of generations probably will eh?

Suddenly we all wished that we had really taken in the Bill Gates prediction that this was bound to happen, or questioned how we had missed the now oft posted speech when Obama told us that this was almost definitely going to happen.

Heigh-ho - we're here now and I guess we just have to get on with it.

It's a strange situation though when literally nobody was ready for something, and within the space of a few days, we were all forced into an environment that we didn't want to be in. We've always assumed that living in the UK we'd be able to leave our houses, nip to the shops, see our friends. All things that we now perceive to be luxuries.

However, everybody being in the same boat has its own inherent problems. Where do we go to moan about our lot, when it's clear that we all have it better than somebody else? The lone person in lockdown yearns for some 'real' company, the family and friends in lockdown yearn to be alone. We have lockdown envy - the 'virtual' grass is indeed greener in everybody else's zoom garden.

With everybody in a forced situation though even a slight social media moan results in a Pythonesque thread of 'how lucky we are compared to Mr/Mrs/Ms/Mx whoever'.

The bottom line though of course is that we all have to just get through this the best that we can, whilst working really hard to see every journey as personal, not an affront to how 'you're' needing to get through this period.

Some people really took to heart the initial social media messages of this is your chance to do everything that you've been putting off for years, though why people felt the need to keep telling us that Shakespeare had supposedly written King Lear, Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra whilst in quarantine during the plague I don't know. Talk about a high bar! Then seemingly within days completed DIY projects and baking posts started to pop up on my timeline at regular intervals, each of them more impressive than the one before. In our industry some people really needed (or indeed just chose) to keep being creative, that was to be their own road map through these uncharted waters (talk about a mixed traveling metaphor). Editors and sound engineers have never been in such demand as we attempt to reproduce that most basic of rights - to produce music with other people. Then there are the people who are genuinely using the lockdown to take some downtime, with a constant stream of requests for the next best programme to watch, or recommendations for their next book. At regular intervals, somebody will remind us that we don't all have to do the same thing to get through this. Freedom of choice is still ours (within our own four walls). We are reminded that just surviving this time is actually winning.

Of course, it wouldn't be social media without some conflict, so we have the posts from those people that feel really strongly about how 'the others' are coping during this time, either applauding from the (virtual) wings with a degree of envy or angry that their way of coping has been made to feel the 'lesser' somehow.

So what is the right way to cope during a pandemic and who actually has the right to judge others? Who's right and who's wrong? Who is having the 'worse' time surviving the lockdown? Is it the parents frantically attempting to homeschool whilst juggling all the other demands too? Is it the shielded who feel like they would rather take their chances with COVID, the families, the lonely?  In our industry is it the so-called Corona grads who have had the rug pulled from under their feet at the start of the most amazing adventure, or is it the seasoned pros, who have been sideswiped as they've seen our industry magically disappear overnight?

Which industry has suffered the most? Surely that one is a no brainer - it's 'our' industry. Overnight everybody was out of work with no idea when we could possibly restart again, but then that's true of the bar owners, the restaurant owners, tour operators, airlines, etc The house of cards that we had thought was so safe suddenly crumbled for so many people. Then as if that wasn't bad enough we're all trumped by the people that are literally putting their lives on the line every day when they go to work or the families that have lost loved ones due to COVID?

Of course, the answer is really quite simple - none of us are having it easy. We are all attempting to stay emotionally grounded. It's not a competition.  The safest way through the Pandemic for each and every one of us is to just 'be', to 'be' however we need to be. If you've seen the Pixar movie Inside Out the control console in our brain is literally being controlled by the full range of emotions - seemingly all at once. One day it's OK, it's doable, we know that it's only a moment and moments pass, the next day the affront to our liberty is exasperating, we can't see how this can possibly end well, the world will never be the same again.

Somebody said to me today that they were struggling right now, but they shouldn't be. Compared to others they actually had it easy. The difficulty with this self-imposed scale of entitlement is that we're not giving ourselves the time and space to grieve what's going on right now. It's like there's some pivot that we're all straddling - we can maintain the equilibrium if we deny ourselves the right to be ecstatic or pissed off or scared or whatever.

The pandemic isn't a competition. I put the college online because I had no choice, not because I wanted to look back in a few years' time and be proud of my achievement during a lockdown. If I had to choose the perfect lockdown scenario, without a shadow of a doubt I'd choose the sit in front of the TV and veg out for a few months' approach*. However I have 2 young children to homeschool, a business to run and an encroaching deadline for a new show which I still have to meet in case the theatres open this year, so I don't have the luxury of choice - but then again I don't think that any of us have a choice right now. We just have to get through it.

So let's not make handling this situation a competition. We're all stuck in our own peculiar circumstances, and within those, we all have the right to feel however we need to feel, whenever we need to feel it and get through it however we can. We don't have to diminish our own difficulties just because we can see what we perceive to be something harder going on elsewhere. Let's all try our best to survive eh? It's not a competition.

Stay safe.

*In the interest of full disclosure I should add that this is forever my 'dream scenario', however, were I ever to have the free time to do this my secret suspicion is that I'm not actually that sort of person as my wife reminds me every time I state it. We all have dreams though right?

So. . . I now run an online college?

The MTA's strange academic year worked out well in terms of the CoronaVirus lockdown. We were incredibly lucky that we managed to complete our 5 performance run of our flagship revue show - Something Old, Something New.  Whilst it's important to note that it's not our Showcase, it is an important production to start introducing our graduating year to the industry.

However, our timeframe did mean that we were able to chat with our students before we ended the term and reassure them in person about how we were going to run an online college if the UK did follow the rest of the world and get put into lockdown. We were even able to chat through roughly how it might work.  We were lucky - 2 days later that's exactly what started to happen. Even though we were then on holiday I did a quick live stream to our private group to remind them not to panic as we'd already spoken about what would happen.


I don't know about anybody else, but I must confess I never had a backup pandemic plan up my sleeve ready for a global shutdown, and with no tech department to help me, I think that I undertook the biggest learning curve of my life (and I thought that I'd already made that journey when I opened the 'real' college 11 years ago). However, I had just 2 weeks to create The MTA Online. One of the things that I felt would work in my favour was that when I created 'the other MTA' back in 2008 I had consciously created a course that I could run and monitor remotely. The idea being that after the college was up and running I could go back on tour and continue to run the college in between my 'real work' as an MD*. The college has a policy that all staff have to be currently working, so the online infrastructure was actually already in place and part of our everyday life.  Our classnote system is online, the timetable is online, there's not a day that goes by where we're not communicating with them via private groups, etc. So it was just the actual teaching to sort out <gulp>

So then it was hitting each problem in order of urgency. The priority was to ensure that all the agent 1:1 auditions could at least be offered in an online format.  So I first made friends with Zoom. What a fast-moving world we all live in isn't it? Suddenly we're all speaking about meeting up in zoom, yet most of us had no bloody clue about it before the pandemic.

The majority of agencies immediately agreed to move their auditions with our graduates online, so that was my first relief moment. We wanted to reassure the students as quickly as possible (even though they don't graduate until September I was aware that they were seeing all the #UK2020grad posts going up which were bound to make them anxious even though they were not in the same position as those graduates that had lost their showcase), so back I went online to live stream some more reassurance. I felt that it was important to be 'present' as opposed to just posting notices.

The next job - was to move our 100% vocational course online.  Finally, after a few years of really fighting against the 'establishment' because I've refused to turn our course into a formal qualification (because our industry is vocational and therefore it's the training that's important not the piece of paper in terms of getting you into the audition room), The MTA came into its own. We could literally rewrite the course to ensure that this would be a valuable term for our students. I was so mindful that they were still paying their fees so I had an obligation to give them value for money albeit in a different way. I was also mindful that our industry had literally had the rug pulled from under it. The MTA has a faculty of very loyal freelancers - the very people that had completely lost their income. So I wanted to try and help to support as many of them as possible too. After all, a college is only as strong as its students AND faculty.  I felt that there was a moral obligation to try to help (if possible)

So emails were sent out explaining that we were going online, and if they wanted to continue to teach for us, they needed to work out how to run online classes. My only stipulation was that the classes had to be interactive. I felt that videoed classes wouldn't allow us to watch and correct the students in real-time, and therefore not achieve the aims of the course which would, in turn, impact the progression that we needed the students to make this term (pandemic or not)

Suddenly I had an entire faculty on the learning curve with me. With that cog working away in the background next up we had to move our auditions online for our 2020 intake. Once again I didn't see the value of them sending in a self-tape as we wanted to work with them, we wanted to interact with them. The MTA's whole day audition is all about getting to know the people, not just the talent. Cue several senior faculty zoom meetings as we worked out how best to run the online audition. Suddenly lockdown was our friend, as when we needed volunteers to help us work it out we were never short of students and graduates willing to pop into the 'virtual' room to help us try out our latest idea.  A plan was formed, the auditionees were notified and before we knew it my senior faculty and myself were all in a virtual room with several complete strangers.

This turned out to be our lightbulb day though. Whilst for sure there were limitations online, it also offered up so many great things. In many ways, we actually preferred the online audition, and it's certainly going to prompt a serious discussion once the dust has settled about how we audition people moving forward. We already offer a free online first-round audition in a bid to save people money, maybe there's a way to move the main audition online permanently - saving them a fortune in travel & often accommodation. Maybe we could offer both options? I don't know. . . but definitely watch this space.

Having experienced a few hours in the 'virtual' college, we all started to realise that there were endless possibilities that we could explore. The MTA does a 50/50 stage/screen split anyway, so actually working with a lens between us offers us lots of opportunities to explore. We live in a world where more and more auditions are via self-tapes. What an amazing chance we had to really focus on all of this stuff.

The dance staff met up and all were confident that they could offer worthwhile online dance classes, voice, and acting were easy to transfer online. Strangely enough, singing was the hardest area, as whilst 1:1 singing lessons could happen with ease, group singing is just not feasible in our 4G world.  After much asking around it seemed like my only option was for the students to mute their mics and sing to a screen? Our students are not singing for pleasure, they are singing to enhance their skill set, we're looking at the nuances of group singing. They might have been blending beautifully, their harmony line might have been divine - but the tutor would never know. However, we did know that the 1:1 stuff worked really well.

Still on holiday we had another live-streamed chat with our students (& graduates. . . as we have a college for life policy and therefore I needed to check in with them too), and as part of our 'checking in with your mental health' chat, we were chatting about what people could do during this lockdown, and lots of people started chatting about learning to play 'that instrument' that has sat in their room for years but they've never had the time to learn it. Cue the next idea. We are not an actor-muso course, nor do we aspire to be, however we all know that instrumental skills are incredibly useful to a performer. So a quick check who could gain access to a guitar to check that my plan would be worth it - and suddenly 75% of the college are now having weekly guitar lessons. Learning in streamed groups expect to see something spectacular at next year's revue (she jokes, but not really).  Then a group came to me as they had access to a keyboard, could we teach them how to play the piano? We're currently putting this in place.

In our senior faculty meeting, we were chatting about the fact that literally, everybody was available right now - so we should try to get some good Q&As and masterclasses going, as they'd work well with this format. It would also mean that our students always had something to look forward to. Days and weeks of lockdown monotony were going to hit hard. We needed to offer them something to be excited about. What an amazing opportunity this online term was going to offer us. Of course, being online meant that we weren't limited to UK guests - so off I hopped over to Broadway (virtually of course), and with the help of our friends, we suddenly found ourselves with one hell of a term. Q&As with film directors, Dexter Fletcher & Joe Wright, writer David Eldridge returns to the college, masterclasses with Cassidy Janson & Annalene Beechey, Q&As with Broadway stars Claybourne Elder, Laura Osnes, Julia Murney, Kara Lindsay, with West End stars Adam Garcia and Louise Dearman, plus meetings with producers, casting directors, resident directors AND a private screening of the Desperately Seeking The Exit thanks to the ever marvelous Peter Michael Marino. . . and. . . well, who knows? 

We're on day 3 and already we've discovered new things, but again because we're completely independent we can implement new ideas within hours. From an 'oh no' term, we're seeing our Pandemic Term as an 'OMG we could do this too...  .' sort of term.

My virtual office stays open for a while after regular classes, so students and graduates can pop in if they're struggling or just to say hello. Our mental health clinician is still available to the entire college 24/7/365 and is of course now just offering online or phone sessions, but it does mean that our lot (& staff) have instant access to a mental health professional if the lockdown is particularly hard for them. 

So that's it, within the space of just 2 weeks . . . I now run an online college. I sit in mission control for hours on end looking at screens, opening up zoom rooms, and planning. What else can we do? Maybe I'll revisit this blog at the end of the Pandemic Term to see if it was really as exciting as we currently think that it's got the potential to be.

Stay safe all 

*this never happened. Turns out running a college is really busy

The Mental Health Epidemic within the Pandemic

Last night the unthinkable happened. Theatre in the UK closed its doors. Frustratingly for theatres and producers this came about via a carefully worded recommendation to our audiences as opposed to a directive to them, thereby potentially preventing companies from having a valid insurance claim. Making companies and individuals even more vulnerable than they were already feeling.

I can't be the only one that never thought that we'd see such a day in the UK (or indeed around the world), but here it is and an entire industry is left reeling as each individual tries to work out 'what now?'

Of course we all knew that it was coming. Broadway closed last week so it's been a waiting game since then. The big difference of course is that our American colleagues earn substantially more money than the jobbing actor/techie in the UK. There is more chance that they've saved up for the inevitable rainy day scenario. That said some people just don't have it in them to save regardless of income, so this isn't guaranteed, however the potential to save is there. I don't think that the majority of the UK industry (on and off stage) have this dilemma. We all live in a somewhat hand to mouth environment, and have long since consoled ourselves with the fact that our souls are full even if our bank accounts aren't. The majority of our industry need the next wage packet, which is why you see people closing in a successful show on the Saturday, going to work in their 'crap job' or 'muggle job' by the Monday. In a way it's kept us all grounded for years, it's hard to get 'up yourself' when you know that you'll be back in civvy street within a few weeks.

So suddenly an entire industry faces a very uncertain future. We all go online to tell the world how frightened we are, and we feel the need to let everybody know what our struggle is. Some of us will be resolute, telling our friends that we'll get through this, as after all, a life without hope is no life at all. However now that people have been prevented from going out, the online chatter is at breaking point. Suddenly we're all experts in what the government 'should' have done, we've all understood the logistical variations of this mystery 'virus', we've all researched what every other country has done, and we've all worked out what the solution 'should' have been. More than that, we feel the need to tell everybody about our own discoveries.  Of course the fact of the matter is that none of us have a clue. We're all scared (for ourselves, our loved ones, our industry, even humanity), and are all simply 'acting out' that fear in the only space that's left for us to roam - social media.

We see a 'cure' or a 'prevention' tweet and it becomes our civil duty to share it amongst our friends and followers, as we all attempt to save the world. Of course that's all we've shared is 'fake news', or rather 'fake hope', as hope is the only thing that we have.

I've long blogged about the mental health crises in our industry, and I've always maintained that the industry hasn't created these illnesses, but rather our industry attracts people who are more susceptible to mental illness, as it provides all of us with an altered reality. We can all pretend to live in a different world for a while. A show (ironically given the pressures around doing one), is almost a mental health break. So what now for an entire industry that revels in living in the 'other' now that it's suddenly been catapulted into the here and now, and what's more, the here and now is even more unstable than our industry. To add to the issue nobody amongst us has immunity. For sure there are the wealthy amongst us that can ride this out, but they are few and far between. From graduates to jobbing performers/techies everybody has had the rug pulled from out of them.

People with anxiety who are already trying to make sense of the world have suddenly lost their anchor, people with depression that can see no good in the world can get that view confirmed within seconds on social media, people with OCD desperately trying to control their environment as it is suddenly find themselves in a world that can't control itself. And so the list goes on. The one thing that we can be sure about is that every mental illness will be made worse by this pandemic.  People can no longer run to the theatre to escape their own 'minds'.

So I guess that this is the perfect opportunity to hit these conditions head on. How many people that deliberately keep themselves busy in order not to think have suddenly found themselves in self isolation? As an aside isn't it weird how something like 'self isolation' which sounds like something straight out of a B movie has suddenly become part of our every day language? Anyway I digress.

There are lots of therapies available online - why not check out what's on offer? https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/iapt/ Whilst the NHS is struggling right now there is still free help out there. See the enforced downtime as an opportunity to 'reset' and 'reboot'. How many of you have kept putting it off because you've allegedly been too busy? Well you ain't busy now - get proactive about your mental health.

Limit your online surfing - it'll either make you more worried, more angry, or bizarrely make you feel more isolated. Even in self isolation it's possible to live more in the 'real world'. FaceTime and Skype your friends. I went to pop a post up on one of The MTA groups the other day, and instead opted for a livestream as I was aware that a number of my graduates were either stuck in far away places or stuck in self isolation in the UK. So potentially even 'seeing' and 'hearing' my post was more reassuring than some written thing.  I mean I clearly could have made it worse for some of them, but they had the option to turn me off (and I'm confident that at various times over the years they've yearned to do that - so it was a win/win)

Somehow this will pass, and somehow we will all get through it.
Our industry has an amazing sense of community, and right now we need that community more than ever. As you're checking on your friends to see if they have a cough and a fever, maybe check on how their mental health is doing too? I've long believed that mental illness is at epidemic levels within our industry, and I suspect that the physical pandemic will make those levels raise even higher. Now is a time for actioning help, not living in denial it's a great #time4change

24/7 Equity mental health and well-being helpline: 0800 917 6470