It seems like the luvvie cabal is getting all bent out of shape about the current demise of the theatre.

Well, times change, and people change with the times.

In 500 years’ time, people might pay to watch mime artists prancing around a turntable offering up their ABBA-inspired interpretative dance.

I don’t recall these ponces getting too worked up about the death of coalmining in the 1980s, but it is somewhat a stretch to expect consistent rationales when self-interest is the prime motivator.

Falling attendances and now the prohibitive response to Coronavirus have brought theatre to its padded knees, and productions of Romeo and Juliet are being faced with their own Verona crisis.

GCSE English students up and down the country are however celebrating that they will swerve 3 hours of boredom and a bad dose of theatre-bench piles, all manifestly Bard stiff.

That £30 they would’ve spunked up on a ticket to the Globe will certainly be better spent on 4 months of Xbox Gold and the opportunity to mercilessly troll pre-suicidal teens across the globe. Way more entertaining and far less likely that the back of their butts will end up falling out.

Unless they are lured via in-game chat to a secret rendezvous with 16-year-old Chloe, who turns out to be 45-year-old Brian with a penchant for angry, dry make-up sex.

Theatre was already dying on its arse – as do the majority of its practitioners – because Joe Public has been increasingly willing to fork out top-dollar to watch a troupe of awful hams labouring over texts that they do not understand.

It’s a rich man’s pose.

The recent Government advertising campaign that encouraged those in astronaut professions to retrain may have smacked of callousness. But no more than the decision by actors and ballet dancers to throw all their chips onto a pipedream with little analytical foresight had smacked of a car-crash gamble.

It’s why I never sold my kidneys to finance my dream of playing professional Subbuteo. It’s sadly tough titties, but at least there are now plenty of future customer service advisors who can surely craft a legible email.

Changing careers is nothing new, nor is it unreasonable – millions never dreamed that they would end up in call centres, and many of those have since moved on to further roles still. Most employees now will end their working lives with 3 or 4 careers behind them.

If the theatre needs a subsidy, that should come from its elite patrons.

After all, they are the only ones who go and certainly the only ones who can afford it.