Marsden's Mikron Theatre and Leeds's Eclipse Theatre on pandemic culture crisis

Thousands of theatre companies nationally employ staff, actors, writers and directors to create shows, but they do not have the overheads of an actual building. However, that does not mean they are escaping from the coronavirus lockdown unscathed.

Marianne McNamara is artistic director of Mikron Theatre, a Marsden-based company which travels the nation every year by narrowboat.

Next year it will celebrate 50 years of existence, but as recently as last month its future was hanging in the balance.

Ms McNamara said: “Our year is very top heavy, so we pay for scripts, actors, we rehearse and then we recoup a lot of that investment when we’re out on tour.

“In a way it was fortunate for us that lockdown came when it did, had it been a couple of weeks later we would have been in rehearsal, our funds would have been spent and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Mikron, one of the idiosyncratic bastions of British theatre, would have disappeared for good this year without a fundraising campaign.

More than 800 supporters bailed out the theatre company by raising nearly £50,000 in just a fortnight, but like many arts organisations, its future is far from assured.

Amanda Huxtable, the recently-installed artistic director of Eclipse Theatre, said: “We’re in choppy waters heading for icebergs. Some big ships were hit first, like Plymouth Theatre Royal (which announced plans last month to make its entire creative staff redundant) but we’re coming up right behind them.”

The company moved to Leeds from Sheffield at the beginning of the year, opening a new office at Mabgate Mills, just a short walk from Leeds Playhouse.

But Ms Huxtable has not been able to welcome artists into the space as she had hoped.

“We had been planning on having open days where we could get to know people, artists and neighbours, but all that has been put on hold,” she said.

“We’re part of an ecology, we travel with our shows from Glasgow to Plymouth, making a home at all these theatres. If they go, where will we take our shows?”