Bard in the Yard: not just a script, but a document for the ages of a tour de force fightback against 2020’s theatrical doom and gloom 

By Dominic Cavendish
 

Introduction to the published scripts of Bard in the Yard

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It’s almost fading into the haze of a dream, or rather, an involuntary shudder at a hair-whitening nightmare: that protracted period when the unthinkable happened and theatres were closed, a misfortune felt particularly acutely during the opening round of collective bewilderment. 

Shell-shocked days after March 16 2020 turned into dumb-struck weeks; an awareness that the darkness was set to last months, if not years, grew. ‘A plague on both your houses’ had sat for centuries as a quaint figure of speech. At a stroke, Covid-19 brought home the reality of that curse, its mortal connotation and implied ruination. Of course the health emergency – and daily news of personal tragedies – took centre-stage, but the related suspension of a regular pastime, theatre-going - now rendered out of reach, at best an ‘online’ activity – was a huge shock. [...]

Amid a wilderness where once there had been plenty, it was the first significant green shoot of theatrical possibility, presented within days of the Government finally giving the go-ahead for outdoor performances, with social distancing, from July 11. 

As the published text makes clear, it contained a good and topical Romeo and Juliet gag, anachronistically rejigging a line from the play to nod to the present malady. ‘Will’, conceived as inspiration-bereft, and plague-constrained, interacts with an audience-member, trying to use a snatch of an old hit to get the juices flowing: “Oh that I were a glove upon that hand, / For health and safety reasons that I might touch that cheek.”

And there was plenty more wit where that came from. I particularly enjoyed: “Since the bakers in Southwark have all closed, I’ve also made a lot of sourdough bread. I’ve binged the entire works of Ovid, Seneca, Cicero and Holinshed.” Just prior to the pandemic, but felled by it, Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow had come into the West End as the reigning monarch of Bardic bio-spoof. It’s no hyperbole, though, to say that the comedy value was just as pronounced in Gartner’s script. 

And the latter felt more like a collector’s item. A playful fancy that was previously an indulgence for waggish minds, Shakespeare-steeped or not, had become a play for today. The writer’s block conceit – familiar also from Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love – achieved a rare urgency; the immortal genius’s own presumed and plausible moments of creative crisis meeting with our own need to rekindle theatre, find a way forward.