“It’s been battering. Depression, real depression was something that I experienced and I don’t mean sadness in terms of what was happening. That inability to feel excitement or joy or positivity. How grim the world at large felt.”

Nicolazzo witnessed a mass exodus from the industry. “I kept seeing so many of my friends, particularly performers, bow out. The darkness of the conversations I was having with friends was really affecting. A lot of performers took on new careers, and have said that they don’t want to get on a stage again. This whole experience was that push over the ledge.”

At first COVID-19 felt like a one-act play. “The first couple of lockdowns, when we came out of them and live performance resumed, there was a real sense of optimism,” says Abrahams, who was directing a play at Red Stitch at the time. “Audiences came back very, very quickly ... the minute the show happened it started selling out.”

But the plague proved an endurance performance. The freelancers who’ve stayed the course thus far know that an entire show could collapse if a cast or crew member tests positive.

In January Katie Sfetkidis was working as lighting designer on MTC’s Touching the Void when a close contact tested positive. “I had to isolate for the first four days of our bump-in.”

The company was able to set up a high-quality camera, hire Sfetkidis an associate and remotely patch her into their communications system. “That’s at a company that is very well-resourced. If I had been doing an indie show I would have been like: sorry guys, I can’t come in.”

Throughout the year Sfetkidis has been receiving two or three emails a week from other companies scrambling to find high-level crew. “There’s such a backlog and then, as everyone’s schedules are moving around, people are having to pull out of things at the last minute.”

With her company THE RABBLE, director Emma Valente has created works for Malthouse and MTC as well as staging many productions away from the mainstage.

“The major companies, we’re not independent from them, we do rely on each other; if there’s going to be collapses there it’s going to really directly affect the ecosystem,” she says.

An example of how that ecosystem functions: major companies around the country were forced to burn through cash reserves in order to remain solvent throughout the pandemic. That means less money to program new work, reduced seasons, smaller casts and fewer opportunities for freelancers.

Writers, perhaps, had an easier time than many during the past few years. Playwright Michele Lee says that as far as her job goes, “the actual writing for long periods of time? Nothing actually changed in practical terms. And personality-wise I didn’t mind.”

Lee is on the playwrights’ committee of the Australian Writers’ Guild, and says that the experience of having work deferred or cancelled during the pandemic has been common. “The guild actually created a new prize this year specifically targeted at plays that were unable to be mounted across the pandemic, particularly in recognition of those plays that weren’t going to be remounted.”

Like many independent artists, Lee says that the onset of the pandemic was leavened by the possibility that structural changes might occur in its wake. “For example, what if all the companies decided to program only Australian work, the way that we saw some music festivals were not having internationals? I thought that would be great, if Australian theatres did that, but then of course they didn’t because I imagine coming out of the pandemic they wanted to be more conservative and get audiences in with known quantities.”

To be fair, MTC’s 2022 calendar features more plays by Australians than it does overseas playwrights. But the backlog of postponed productions at all major companies means that there are fewer opportunities for new work.

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“Everything that will be happening for the rest of this year, and maybe next year as well, are all the shows that we were talking about in 2019,” says Abrahams. “We know that in 2023 in particular if we haven’t had something in development with a mainstage, we’re most likely not going to have a job. Particularly for directors.”

Commercial theatre producers, too, have shied away from producing new work in favour of salvaging cancelled productions or reproducing previous successes. Mounting an original production is a far lengthier, riskier and more expensive prospect.

Declan Greene has bounced between indie and mainstream theatre more than most, at first staging cult shows in backyards and garages before bringing that same iconoclastic spirit to our major stages. In 2019 he left Melbourne to take up a position as artistic head of Sydney’s Griffin Theatre. Two weeks later the pandemic hit.

Like many artistic directors around the country, he’s spent the years since “un-producing” work. “Producing is getting the play on and un-producing is taking the play apart. It’s really, really hard to have to say to artists that we’re not going to be creating this work that you’ve been emotionally preparing and working for years on at this point.”

But isn’t all of this in the job description? Aren’t artists hardened against disappointment? Used to getting by on the smell of an oily rag?

“That mode of working is 100 per cent about privilege,” says Valente. “If you can work for free, or virtually for free, for five years, then something else is propping you up. I think that mode of working really locks a bunch of people out of the industry.”

“I think that narrative of resilience masks a lot at the moment,” says Greene. “There’s so much intense burnout that I perceive in terms of independent artists. Across the industry there’s a high level of burnout inside companies as well, in terms of the staff who support artists.”

Just to get by at the best of times, says Nicolazzo, “you’ve got to make sure you’ve got five to seven projects on the boil so that you can prepare for the next two to three years, and then you’ve also got to teach on the side, mentor young artists, which takes up another part of your energy, so you don’t get the space to go ‘what do I actually want to make and how do I want to change as an artist?’”

Artists are well acquainted with the “freedom” afforded by gig work, but the pandemic laid bare how economies based on precarious contract-based employment leave nothing by way of a safety net.

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“It became really clear to me that there’s no protection for independent artists and independent companies,” says Valente. “There’s no union, no representation, there’s [lobby group] Theatre Network Australia and that’s really about it. COVID was making that very explicit. Most people were just cut off and felt abandoned.” In the lead-up to the next federal election, Theatre Network Australia has joined 15 other national bodies to draw attention to the under-valuation of the performing arts.

Valente says the precariousness of theatre work has resulted in “a huge upheaval”.

“It’s really hard to get tech staff, production managers, and actually those folk were similar to performers, they couldn’t do their jobs, they’re also a gig economy and were just completely shut out from working. A lot of people bowed out or tried to get more secure jobs,” she says.

“It’s not only crew,” says Greene, “it’s producers, stage managers, production managers. There’s definitely a scarcity out there at the moment.”

There have been silver linings. The relative neglect artists experienced when it came to government assistance throughout the pandemic has been well-documented, but for those who did manage to secure JobKeeper, the results were revelatory. “I spoke to many freelance artists about this,” says Abrahams. “We kind of had this four-month period where we were like, oh wow, is this what it feels like to have a secure income? I think a lot of people started thinking about the idea of a basic universal income and what that offers, particularly in the creative field.”

It’s hardly an impossible dream. Ireland is now trialling a basic income for 2000 artists, actors and musicians, while similar schemes have been deployed in France and various cities across the US.

“Many countries in Europe have been doing that for a while. Once you reach a particular point as a mid-career artist, you do get some government support. It’s not like a free-for-all and it’s not like the dole,” says Abrahams.

For those – Steinbeck’s tough and devoted – who weathered the tempest lashed to the mast, the future might be uncertain. They’re staying the course, though. Nicolazzo was recently in Canberra working on the show he directed for Denise Scott and Judith Lucy. “Everybody was just happy to be there, so there was all this relaxed energy and we took our time and didn’t rush, and the venue was amazing. It was just: Sit in this and appreciate how lucky we are that we’re back in here. That was magic.”

The show’s title? Still Here.

Still Here is at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, March 31-April 24. Admissions is at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, until April 9. Yentl is at Arts Centre Melbourne until March 26.