Winning back audience trust, the doctor turned novelist, musical collaboration in lockdown

How will community theatre companies help restore audience confidence to go back into theatres after the lockdown? And how do we measure how important they are in bringing people to watch live theatre? Alan Lane is director of Slung Low and Holly Lombardo leads the National Rural Touring

Simon Stephenson gave up a career as a paediatric doctor to pursue a career in writing. His first novel Set My Heart to Five, a futurisitic story about an Android who wants to feel human emotion is set to be adapted as a film by the Oscar-winning producers of hits such as Notting Hill.

Opera North’s Resonance programme offers residencies to BAME music-makers to collaborate with other artists on new work. However most of this year's residencies have been postponed due to Coronavirus, so instead artists have been taking part in a special lockdown instalment of the programme, collaborating remotely to bring together African music with Indian raag, electro dub with traditional Chinese zither playing, poetry and hip hop. Singer-songwriter Tawiah and composer Matthew Kofi Waldren have been working on weaving African gospel sounds with the western choral tradition in a piece that explores themes of matriarchy, motherhood and liberation.