Let’s get back to applauding actors, not the NHS – David Behrens

But, of course, he is the exception within the theatrical profession, not the rule – and the other statistics given to MPs this week represent a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Many theatres will close not just for the duration but for good, said the cross-party Culture Committee, which forecast an arid cultural landscape not unlike that of 60 years ago, when abandoned cinemas were turned wholesale into bingo halls.

In the first 12 weeks of lockdown, it reported more than 15,000 performances were cancelled, with the loss of at least £300m at the box office.

That’s bad enough, but the headline figure conceals the human cost of so much lost work – for while theatre staffs might have been furloughed by their managements, the performers will have had no such safety net.

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At the other end of the scale from Lloyd‑Webber is a friend of ours, with whom we shared a drink backstage a couple of weeks before the curtain fell. I won’t mention her name – not because it would embarrass her but because I’d have her agent on the phone demanding a fee.

She has been an actress all her life and is now in her 50s – or, in agent-speak, her late 30s. You may have seen her on TV but you wouldn’t recognise her in the street nor know her name.

She was in a big musical production at the Grand Theatre in Leeds when we saw her. It was part of a tour that had kept her in work for the best part of a year, but it was ending soon and she didn’t know where her next job was coming from, or when. It was hard to juggle auditions in London with a Tuesday matinee 200 miles away. But that is the lot of the jobbing actor.

She had put enough aside from a previous role to upgrade the heating in her flat, she said. I didn’t press her for the financial details, but it wasn’t the sort of hand-to-mouth detail I would have expected to hear from Judi Dench.

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Actors, like the rest of us, have chosen their path in life; they knew what they were getting into. But they never expected everyone to be out of work at the same time. That didn’t happen even during the war.

And it goes to the root of the problem, because no-one else seemed to have anticipated anything like it, either. On the same day the culture report was published, another Commons committee was laying into the Government for failing to plan for the economic impact a pandemic would have. It was, they said, “astonishing” that the Treasury had waited until mid-March, a few days before the lockdown, before deciding what support schemes it would put in place. As a result, entire sectors were left behind, with the likely consequence of long-term damage to countless livelihoods.

Let’s back Boris Johnson; he’s all we have – Bernard Ingham

It may be true that the present administration could have been quicker on its feet, but this is less a failing of any one Government than of the civil service, which exists to make contingencies.

It leads one to wonder whether anyone has yet put in place a Plan B to deal with the fallout from a second lockdown, which if enforced would see the economy in West Yorkshire alone shrink by £12bn this year, its council leaders have said.

Employment levels, they forecast, would not recover for five years – and that is the statistic that really matters.

The incalculable social and health cost of consigning hundreds of thousands to the lingering hell of a life without work was never fully considered in March when we hunkered down to protect the NHS but nothing else. That’s why Boris Johnson believes that doing it all again, in a second national lockdown, would be akin to the nuclear deterrent. But with Bradford, Kirklees, Wakefield and Barnsley identified as “areas of concern” last weekend, it behoves us all to take no risks and to grin and bear the future from behind our face masks.

As for the theatres, signs of life are beginning to return but there is a hard road ahead if we are to avoid becoming the cultural wasteland that the Commons committee invoked. We won’t know that we have truly turned the corner until we are once more back in the stalls applauding the actors, not on the streets clapping for the NHS.

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