Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (“1917,” “Skyfall”) has issued a passionate plea in an effort to keep London stage productions alive… and is asking the help of global streaming services to do so.
Mendes has penned an article for The Financial Times this week offering ideas on how to help save theatres in the UK which played to a collective audience of 34 million people in 2018 alone – the same number that attended Premier League and English Football League matches.
However, Mendes admits the logistics of live performances are complicated in the COVID-19 wra and “the continuance of social distancing makes the prospect of reopening simply impossible”. That makes financial support from other sources a necessity:
“Many other businesses will be able to adapt – shops, offices, public spaces, some restaurants. Even a cinema with reduced capacity can have five showings a day of a single movie, making it perfectly possible to have a relatively successful socially distanced commercial run. But theatre and live performance – with one performance a day, and sellable seats reduced by an average of 80 percent – simply cannot stay afloat.”
In terms of coming up with solutions, Mendes offers three. One is an increase in the theatre tax-relief scheme for the next three years to help ongoing running costs, another is government investment in productions in exchange for some of the profits.
The most interesting one is that he calls for more support from ‘Theatrical Angels’ and more specifically Amazon and Netflix as companies “whom COVID-19 has made rich” and are “making lockdown millions from our finest acting, producing, writing and directing talent”. He hopes they don’t sit back “while the very arts culture that nurtured that talent pool is allowed to die.”
