As soon as lockdowns started all over the world in 2020, the story that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine at a moment when theatres had to close all over England because of the plague in the early 17 th century began to appear in the news and social networks (Dickson 2020). This anecdote might be true or not, but the fact that Shakespeare was soon connected to COVID and its dire cultural consequences is significant in itself and raises the following question: how can theatre practitioners, and artists in general, continue to create during a pandemic? And, for that matter, how can teachers in film and theatre studies continue to pass on knowledge and skills to their students? In what follows, I offer a particular account of how these two questions can interact.