London (AFP)

People come from all over the world to attend musicals, but since the coronavirus pandemic, the West End district in London has been silenced, forcing it to reinvent itself to survive.

Fifteen million tickets are sold each year to see "The Phantom of the Opera", "Les Misérables" or "La Souricière" by Agatha Christie, a play performed since 1952.

Closed since March because of the pandemic, theaters are wondering about their future if physical distance measures (two meters between each person currently in England) and traffic restrictions persist.

Louis Hartshorn and Brian Hook, co-founders of Hartshorn-Hook productions, are among the first to have announced the resumption, for October, of "The Great Gatsby", an immersive spectacle revised and corrected to adapt to the health context.

"The show will be reimagined like a masked ball," Brian Hook told AFP. Spectators are invited to wear masks, which they can incorporate into their disguise, and gloves, if they wish.

Good news: tickets "sell out and people want to come back," notes Brian Hook. Louis Hartshorn recognizes this however: "It has to work extremely well to reach the break-even point because the figures are against us".

The great difficulty in the immediate future is the absence of tourists. Hotels, restaurants and museums remain closed, at least until early July. And the introduction on June 8 of a fortnight for travelers arriving in the United Kingdom has postponed any prospect of recovery.

"Around a third of spectators in London theaters are international tourists (...) and for the moment, there is little hope of seeing them return," deplored Julian Bird, head of the association UK theater, in front of a parliamentary committee.

A total of 70% of British theaters could be bankrupt by the end of the year, he said.

- Immersive experiences -

The health crisis causes a hole of three billion pounds (3.3 billion euros) in cinema revenues this year, a fall of more than 60%, according to a study carried out by Oxford Economics for Creative Industries Federation.

This estimate does not take into account the possible reluctance of the public to return when this is allowed, warns this federation which fears 200,000 job cuts without intervention of the public authorities.

To survive, some are already reopening in another form.

In the theater of the Old Vic, the actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith, stars of the series "The Crown", will play without audience the play "Lungs". Each performance will be filmed and broadcast live to a thousand people who bought their tickets at the price they would usually pay, between 10 and 65 pounds, although this time, all will benefit from the same view.

The gamble is daring while many other theaters, such as the National Theater, have put on line for free on their website plays filmed before the pandemic.

For Brian Hook, the context will favor the shows involving the spectators. "There was already a boom for immersive theater before this crisis (...) I think it will be very positive for that".

The company One Night Records will launch a project of this type in early October, in a secret place, "Lockdown Town" ("Confined City"), a walk to discover musical genres from the 1920s to the 1950s.

"Because the place is so big and because it is an immersive experience, we can do it," One Night Records chief executive Tim Wilson told AFP. He had to adapt, selling tickets in groups of four and transforming free walking into a linear route.

Physical distancing measures are a real headache. The Royal Shakespeare Company could thus only welcome 20% of its regular audience. "Not financially viable," said Catherine Mallyon, executive director of the company based in Stratford-upon-Avon, the city of the famous bard, to AFP.

As for the staging, she warns, "Romeo and Juliet two meters apart, it's hard to imagine".

© 2020 AFP