Almeida; Bridge; Big House; Hampstead, London
As theatres ease into the new normal, the Almeida and Big House celebrate connection and isolation, while Nicholas Hytner’s A Christmas Carol delivers simple pleasures
It was as if all the doors of an advent calendar had been flung open at once. Last week, after the month of darkness, theatres rescheduled their openings, and scrambled over one another to pack everyone in – which is to say, arrange their diminished spectators so that the gaps between them felt like a healthy breath rather than the reminder of a threat. Excitement! Anxiety! And a sea change. Not only the spacing, not only the choreography, but the sound of the stalls has been altered. Instead of elbowing your way into the auditorium through a bar scrum, you process sedately in file, with ushers patrolling like genial sentries. People don’t shout; there is murmur not hubbub in the auditorium. For the time being, one of the small but significant mysteries of the theatre is not happening: gone is that minute just before the start of a play when suddenly, without instruction, the entire audience stops buzzing and falls silent.
What is performed has of course been altered by the exigencies of Covid. Safety favours short plays and, when not monologues, small casts: how long will it be before we have a production of King Lear in which the poor old chap has only one daughter? It is inspiriting that the much-missed Almeida theatre has reopened with a new work that fronts up to these difficulties and reaches for solidarity while talking of seclusion.