I have spent a large proportion (if not all) of my career in the theatre directly and indirectly exploring its position as a place of meeting. I think all my works and writings have addressed, address or contain ideas connected to this in some way. An audience undertaking an act of gathering – even if it is just an audience of one – is for me a primary and inescapable element of my practice. A sense of something collective and collaborative. Of people together in space and time.

I can think of examples of theatre without many things – without actors, without lights or sound or costume, even without a theatre. I can’t ever think of an example of theatre without an audience, though. Even if it is just me sitting here reading or thinking to myself, as you may be with this now.

The difficulty and complexity as well as the simplicity and clarity of this – the togetherness in it – feels central to everything I write, do, make and teach. In designated theatres. In lecture halls. In rehearsal and teaching rooms.

I type in circumstances where this act, along with the possibility it presents to me, has been suspended. I am missing it. It’s probably inevitable that in my attempt to contribute an imagined theatre what I find myself imagining is an audience.