Kwame Kwei-Armah backs Seat Out to Help Out calls

Kwame Kwei-Armah has supported proposals for a Seat Out to Help Out scheme to help theatres regain audiences after the pandemic.

The Young Vic artistic director said he believed an equivalent scheme to Eat Out to Help Out for live performance would "make a great difference" to the sector’s recovery.

He was speaking on the day the Young Vic marked its 50th birthday, and as it announced a year-long programme celebrating its history and its future that will see it host live performance next month for the first time since March.

More than 46,000 people have now signed a petition calling for a Seat Out to Help Out scheme, and in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Kwei-Armah said of the proposals: "We knew from the moment we went into lockdown that if we tell everybody to stay inside and be careful, then we would need help to tell people that they could come back into the magic space we call theatre. So I think it’s a brilliant idea and I really hope that this comes to fruition."

Kwei-Armah also discussed ways in which the Young Vic, and the wider theatre sector, may have to rethink the way they operate after the pandemic.

He said theatre "is going to change" when it returns, and said: "I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I know there will be new forms, I know there will be new relationships with audiences, I know that cameras will probably be integrated into every of part what we do so that if we have a lockdown again we can share our magic with people via the internet. I do think it will change – it will morph and that’s really exciting and it’s challenging."

In celebration of its 50th birthday, the Young Vic has announced a year-long programme of work, comprising three major commissions, including the return of live performance to the venue next month.

On October 3 and 4, it will host The New Tomorrow, a free festival of performances, including activist speeches about what the next 50 years might bring.

Artists involved include Jade Anouka, Jasmine Lee-Jones, Marina Carr, Stef Smith, Jack Thorne and Isobel Waller-Bridge.

The anniversary programme, We are the New Tide, begins tonight (September 11) by using its building as a canvas onto which it will project a video installation celebrating the people and productions that have contributed to the theatre across five decades.

It will also host a free interactive installation by artists Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Anna Fleischle commemorating "three unsung trailblazers of the black community" – nursing pioneer Mary Seacole, LGBT+ activist Marsha P Johnson and Ulric Cross, the most decorated black serviceman of the Second World War.

Kwei-Armah said of the plans: "We had planned to hold a giant street-party celebration to mark the beginning of our 50th-birthday year – we had envisioned 50 individual stages in and around the Young Vic featuring the people who make up its DNA – drama students and community members, actors, artists, creatives, technical crews. And we were going to invite hundreds of people to join us.

"This year has taken a very different turn, and it feels vital our revised birthday plans serve this urgent moment, on this precipice of monumental change. The Young Vic’s extraordinary past will be rightly celebrated, but we cannot do this without acknowledging the seriousness of this present moment and also looking towards our future."