When theatres emptied during the pandemic, I had to make my own

Back then, noses had been made illegal. Nor were mouths permitted. Everyone wore a mask.

Looking out of a window at those people keeping their distances it was very clear their faces had been censured. As if these were only partial humans that walked about beyond our homes. Look at all those half-heads. The masks in theatre, in Commedia dell’arte say, generally have the other half of the face concealed. What strange piece of theatre then was everyone engaged in?

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The world was closed. We couldn’t see anyone, go anywhere. Theatre then, of course would be especially dangerous. Live entertainment – alive entertainment – was dead, what we saw on our screens was old. Nothing was now any more, nothing was fresh. The act of putting on a play for a group of assembled people, to communicate a story in live time was outlawed.

Back then, all the theatres had gone dark. All those empty spaces all over the world. All the seats folded up. The place so quiet. That room, that one wonderful, windowless room – the stage – was empty. Losing its function, it had been made into just any room. A ghost space. No wonder no more. All the stories silent. The excitement of something happening before your eyes, impossible. That place where you can pull up long-dead people, Henry V for example, Richard III, and say here they are alive again in front of us. Well, that place was not happening, the dead stayed dead. The stage, that room that can be anywhere was nowhere.

In the theatre you can’t stop what is unfolding in front of you until it’s over, it controls you. In theatre you are shown what a human being is while all along sitting with human beings, mutually experiencing the journey, laughing together, sometimes crying. 

The Conservative Party seems to think that the arts are a luxury, but how else could we think for ourselves, how else do we express ourselves, how else do we communicate, how else can we be defined, how else do we know who we are, how else might we keep sane?

• Arts funding in schools must be protected, or we all lose 
• How the Northern Ballet’s empty orchestra pit perfectly sums up UK’s arts crisis 

Back then, back then we were in plague. Thousands and thousands of us, separated from loved ones, were dying. We were all shut up in our places, we couldn’t see anyone. I sat about in my little home with my family and wondered what I do now. I wondered how to make, for example, a little theatre. I thought I’d try that, perhaps set a novel in a theatre, and never leave it. I thought of Xavier de Maistre, who in1790 was placed under house arrest and during his incarceration wrote Voyage Around my Room, a sort of guidebook to his confined space. We’d all have to be a bit like de Maistre and find a whole world in our little places. 

I thought of those perfectly portable Victorian toy theatres, which children assembled themselves and then for their own entertainment mounted their own miniature comedies and tragedies out of card. They knew how to summon theatre well enough. In the bedroom, in the kitchen or sitting room, theatre could start whenever they like. Well then, I’d try and bring the theatre back to my mind by writing about it.

I had always longed to write about theatre and now, when they were all closed up, seemed the right time. I’d worked for theatre in England and Lithuania; I’d been fortunate enough to work with a shadow puppet master in Malaysia; once for a couple of months I’d lived inside a theatre in Romania. Stuck in Austin, Texas, where I live and lived throughout the pandemic, I longed for England, I thought of my childhood which had been mostly spent in a village near Norwich.

I always illustrate my novels and draw the characters. It’s the best way I know of getting to know them, so I thought I would set this new book in a theatre and illustrate it with a Victorian toy theatre and, theoretically the reader could cut the book up and construct the theatre (or you could just go to my website and download it).

The characters in the novel, Edith Holler, would be represented by card theatre characters. And the book, set in Norwich, would be narrated by a child who had never left the theatre who had been cursed by some old actor and the wonder of this curse had spread and people believed it and her father, the actor manager, kept her imprisoned in the theatre because audiences would come just to get a glimpse of this child. And this child had been fed on stories and fantasies and had grown up grey-skinned and a little odd.

I thought I’d better go back to Norwich then while staying in Texas and try to do what the theatre does: go somewhere while staying exactly where you are. In the theatre you can believe in impossible things, while watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, you believe in fairies. I sat down in front of my computer, in those plague days, and tried to pull up the curtain.

Edward Carey is an author and illustrator.

Edith Holler by Edward Carey is out now (Gallic, £16.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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