The closure of theatres has been as painful for actors and drama-lovers as the closure of churches has been for worshippers. Live performance is spiritually nourishing, and you have to be present to enjoy the full experience. Yet our drama critic has found that, out of loss, new and creative art forms have emerged that are more democratic and accessible

At 6.30 p.m. on Monday 16 March, I was about to leave a hotel room in Leeds, to review at the West Yorkshire Playhouse a new play called Missing People. My phone rang: unknown caller, local code.

It was the theatre’s press office. Boris Johnson had just announced that the government was not closing the theatres, but would advise people not to go to them. It is hard now not to feel nostalgic for a time when weirdly confusing and contradictory government advice came as a surprise. So Missing People was now a missing play.

That evening, I filled the 90 minutes the production would have occupied with a long walk around the city – a poignant setting as it was in Leeds, aged six, that a pantomime began my theatre habit – unsure if the new plague made it dangerous to eat in a restaurant or get takeaway food. In the end, I bought supermarket fresh fruit, and washed it in boiling water from the hotel kettle before eating. There is also nostalgia for a time when such precautions felt self-consciously paranoid.