It was August 2020 and, in the midst of the pandemic, I was in London directing Knives in Hens by David Harrower as the final piece of my Master’s degree. Given the six months of lockdowns and Zoom plays we had all endured, it was a relief and a privilege to be back in a rehearsal room creating theatre in person again, particularly as most theatres in both Malta and the UK remained shut, but the ongoing crisis remained an unignorable presence. 

Masks, of course, were a staple in rehearsals; the theatre’s capacity, normally around 100, had been cut to a maximum of 10; and a close contact in the technical team threatened to scupper the whole show days before opening. But strangest by far was the social distancing restrictions that applied also to the action on stage: for the play to go ahead, the actors would need to remain two metres apart at all times. 

Touch is built into the fabric of theatre. As an artform, its power is in contact, literal and otherwise, between actor and actor, actor and audience. Actors touch one another as if it’s a reflex (which of course it is). Asking them to keep the length of a grand piano between them is like asking a tennis player to keep one hand behind their back: possible, but counterintuitive, difficult and stupid. Theatre, it’s said, is life distilled: no wonder then that the sudden snatching away of human contact we all endured last year was felt so much more keenly here.

Knives in Hens, the play I found myself working on, was not written to be staged like this. A brutal fable set in a desolate pre-Industrial landscape, its language is taut and sparing, its characters communicating more through what they don’t say than what they do. It features scenes both of sex and of physical violence. No hiding, in other words, from the two-metre elephant in the room. Confronting it head on meant uncovering, somehow, what touch looks like in a world without touch.

Actors thrive on touch, but have had to learn to make do without during the pandemic. Photo: Alex Brenner/LAMDA

And so we did. We explored the ways a body responds to being touched, how it melts into a loved one’s embrace and stiffens against an unwelcome one, how it reacts to being punched, pushed or pulled, what the electricity that passes through a light grazing of hands looks like, the comfort – or the intimidation – of a firm grasp. And then we set about doing all that, but two metres apart. 

The urge to draw close, whether for intimacy or confrontation, remained, perhaps sharper than ever precisely because it was forbidden, and on several occasions work on a scene had to be stopped to remind the actors of the restrictions in play. But slowly a language emerged. Eye contact became charged, the invisible two-metre line became a powerful force-field an actor could generate dramatic tension by pushing against. A fight became a thrown handful of the flour that covered the set, which somehow seemed more violent and offensive than a thrown fist might have been. And those sex scenes? They became something like a dance, the distance between the actors seeming to change in line with what the actors were portraying from tender and poignant in one scene to sterile and disengaging in another. It was hard by the end to imagine the play any other way. 

It’s not lost on me that in working backwards from normal human contact to reimagine what that could look like in a pandemic world, we were in a way tracing the same journey everyone went on at the start of the outbreak, as we replaced our regular routines with Zoom meetings and quiz nights from one day to the next. Theatre itself has, barring brief windows like the one I was offered in the summer, been almost exclusively limited to our screens for nearly a year. If actors chafe at being held two metres apart, then what about confining them to a teleconferencing window with just the slightly out-of-sync image of a scene partner to play off? 

And yet it’s endured, reimagining that mystical contact between actor and audience as we did between actor and actor. Stripping back and rethinking this theatrical connection to survive a deadly crisis has made clear how desperately we miss it, how essential we should consider it in better times. But it’s also made clear theatre’s impossible resilience, its ability to find new modes of expression whether two metres or two hundred miles apart. 

"If every auditorium were razed to the ground, theatre would still survive, because the hunger in each of us to act and to be acted to, is genetic,” Declan Donellan, artistic director of theatre company Cheek by Jowl, once wrote. “This intense hunger even crosses the threshold of sleep. For we direct, perform and witness performances every night, theatre cannot die before the last dream has been dreamt."

Philip Leone-Ganado completed an MA in Directing at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art with the support of the Malta Arts Scholarships Scheme financed by the Government of Malta.