Flicker of hope for actors and theatre workers angered by Rishi Sunak’s lack of help: Nick Ahad

The play safely sent off, saved as a pdf and backed up on my hard drive (Writers! Back Up Your Work. Trust me on this), I went for a walk and realised that, if the play is produced as expected at some point next year, it will see five actors gainfully employed. I also recently finished the latest draft of another play, one which will see six actors in work if it has the chance to see the light of stage next year.

It took me a while to do the maths, but once I got home and found a calculator and a sheet of paper on which I could write the figures down, I realised my suspicions were correct: put both casts together, five and six and that’s 11 actors (there’s a reason I went into the arts and not accounting). How wonderful.

I’ve spent a huge chunk of my professional life writing for and about theatre and so I say with some degree of insight: actors are wonderful. It takes a certain kind of person to do a job so full of rejection, so demanding of the self, so brutal and so tender, so demanding of resilience and of vulnerability.

If my plays are staged there is of course a whole army of other people who will also work on them: the actors are only the chocolate pieces on top of the squirty cream on top of the ice cream on top of the cheesecake of a production (anyone else inexplicably gained weight during lockdown, by the way?).

It’s an army of people who make up a whole industry and who are flaming angry at the minute at someone who is significantly better than I am at maths: Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Actors, producers, stage hands, designers, directors, fight co-ordinators, I could go on and I will: scenic artists, choreographers, set builders, costume designers, I could go on...dancers – you get the picture: a lot of people in the creative arts are feeling decidedly angry at the Chancellor’s winter economic plan which contained no specific help for a creative industry in freefall.

My message to those in the industry is: have hope. I had a skip in my step when I realised there was a possibility of almost a dozen actors in my work when we emerge from this globally challenging moment – and I’m not alone. The stages are dark, but there are torches being lit all over the land from creative to creative hopefully lighting the way along a path out of this.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson