The dreamers are paying the price for taking the path less traveled but 2020 has shown the creative sector is anything but ‘nonessential’.
From the Tyrone countryside to an apartment overlooking Times Square, it seems like an unlikely transition for many, add in an upcoming Broadway debut and it’s almost too good to be true.
And because of the year that 2020 is, it was.
The equaliser or inequaliser that 2020 is, depending on which light you see it, has shown us many home truths in all facets – not least our chosen career paths.The truth is some of us lead riskier lives than others. Those who dared to dream have felt the dramatic impact of the C-word perhaps more than those who opted for ‘safe’ careers or industries. For those of us who fall into the safe camp, there’s been the relative luxury of working from home for more than nine months now.
Covid-19 victims come in every shape and size and across every strata of society. In fact almost every person can tell a story on how their life has been impacted, it’s been the greatest equaliser of the century in some ways. Simultaneously, the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘the have nots’ has never been more apparent.
I spoke to actor and musician Zara Devlin about her journey and what it is to be an artist in 2020 during a global pandemic. Growing up in rural Northern Ireland, her career advisor was dubious at her first choice of ‘actor’, being a broadway star wasn’t within her expectations at the time. After studying drama at the Lir Academy in Dublin with the likes of the now stratospheric Paul Mescal of Normal People fame, she had a slow but steady series of parts post-college. A couple of years later the elusive big break came and Zara found herself as the lead female in the Broadway debut production of Sing Street.
The work from home professionals have the necessary mechanisms in place for a rainy day, both literally and figuratively, but without the weekend brunches or mini-breaks where have we been getting our joie de vivre lately ?
Well…the Arts – whether that’s a playlist as the background noise to our kitchen table jobs, the series that we tune into when we move from work chair to non work chair for the evening, or the book we escape in before bed.
The irony of the Broadway production’s subject matter wasn’t lost on Zara, described on the official broadway website as ‘Dublin, 1982. Everyone is out of work. Thousands are seeking bluer skies across the Irish Sea.’ Fast-forward to 2020, she tells me many more are now out of work, but this time there are no bluer skies.
Only a couple of weeks from opening night, Singstreet Broadway closed up shop mid-march. Ironically, it was the same day the cast went into the theatre to see the final set. A few weeks later, the cast were advised to return to their home countries until things became more clear.
Zara admits at the time she thought it would be a few weeks, a couple of months at the most – now at the time of writing 2021 is almost upon us. When I ask her what’s next, she fears theatre will be one of the most affected, “I think theatre will be the last thing to open again, the next couple of months I have some projects coming up, but we’re figuring out ways to do it and adapting to the new ways of doing things”.
For strangers to pack an auditorium in close proximity again still seems like a far-flung possibility. Longer-term, there is a real possibility that Covid-19 will lead to an entire lost generation of artists, with fears that the industry will become ‘more risk-averse, more white, more posh’.
Now based in Dublin living with housemates, she explains the arts scene is starting to slowly revive and there’s a sense of camaraderie among the community, even in finding somewhere to live “in the acting community if someone moves out of a house and there’s a room going then everyone knows about it’’.
Financially, of course it’s taken a major hit on the creative community and how to best make it viable in a digital world, ‘I’m sure there are things out there to monetise but I can’t figure it out, it’s hard to monetise creative talent virtually.’
In October of this year, consultancy firm EY published a report commissioned by the Arts Council, Yannick Cabrol, Assistant Director at EY commented: “The Arts and Entertainment sectors will be hit harder and for longer than any other part of the economy by this pandemic. During the second quarter of this year it was the most impacted sector in Ireland with a 67.7 percent decline in GDP, ten times more than the rest of the economy.”
Has it dampened her optimism for the future? I bring up the British government’s recent ‘Rethink.Reskill.Reboot’ campaign advising people to ‘retrain’ in cyber security, which went viral for all the wrong reasons and was subsequently pulled. She tells me, in fact the opposite, “if anything I want to do this more than ever, part of me thinks I needed this year to realise it, I’ve been busy since I left college and I took it for granted and I appreciate it more now.”
“Being on the stage is like breathing for me, it’s all i want to do, to have that taken away and for people not to understand it is tough.”
“I was on Facebook recently and a friend had posted something that if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that actors are non-essential and when you read things like that it’s very disheartening and it makes you feel useless.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of theatre hangs in the balance, not only in Ireland but across the pond and beyond. Many productions start off in small theatres in Britain and continental Europe before filtering through to Broadway, that established pipeline has now been effectively destroyed.
For Zara, the short-term looks Ireland based, with some exciting projects coming up on this side of the Atlantic.
“I don’t think you need to live in America for TV anymore, that might have been the answer 7 years ago, shows like Derry Girls and Normal people have put Ireland on the map internationally”.
Yet there’s only one Broadway and one New York city, “It’s so weird to be in a world where you can’t physically go where you want to go” she laments.
One thing’s for sure, there’s no second guessing, “It’s like a relationship, you either strive in it or it falls apart this year, you either want it more than ever or not at all.”
Christelle Mckillen 