This is great and very welcome. Thank you to all of those who have lobbied on our industry's behalf, to everyone who wrote to their MP and to those who contributed to the social media campaigns. https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1279876376305242113

But it would have been more effective had it arrived earlier and fewer people would've lost their jobs. Hopefully those redundancies can be now be reversed and hopefully those institutions that had to close can still somehow be saved.

There will be an industry to come back to - which is a relief. But we must not return to the old ways of doing things - that thinking almost brought the entire thing crashing down. The arts should be integral to our lives and its value should not need to be pleaded.

Art has carried me through the worst times of my life - as nourishment, as distraction and as solace. It has been 21 months since my daughter died and I have been held together by theatre, television, film, art galleries, video games and music. I would not have coped without it.

And, now my son has arrived - a lockdown baby - one of the greatest pleasures I have right now is sharing with him the music and children's books I love. I cannot wait to take him to the theatre, to the pantomime, to the cinema, to his first concert, to his first art gallery.

Art can be the scaffolding that holds together broken hearts. It can be a roadmap through grief. It can be an articulation of feelings and thoughts you wouldn't otherwise know how to express. It can be our hope and our anger. And it can be our communal voice if we let it.

Ignore ideas of high brow and low brow - those actors voicing your computer games are often the same as those in your theatres. Writers on your favourite bingeable TV shows also write for our stages. Directors of our soaps end up making films nominated for Oscars.

It's up to those in the industry to breakdown the grotesque superiority - both real and perceived - that has brought British theatre so close to irrelevance and closure. We're not safe yet - and resting on our laurels has brought us to our knees.

I hope this money is enough and is used well, because there's going to be a lot of people angrily demanding why the hell we should get anything at all.