During the Covid crisis, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has been collecting what it calls Pandemic Objects: artefacts that have taken on new significance in our changed lives. Let’s hope its remit includes archiving Scenes for Survival, a collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and the BBC, now more than halfway through its 50-odd digital responses to life under lockdown. Many of these short commissions seem not only like plays for today but plays for tomorrow.
Viewed from afar, they will become time capsules, bottling an era when play parks were cordoned off, key workers were celebrated yet exploited and a visit from the postie was a social highlight of one’s week.
Even in the short time the series has been running, you can trace how our concerns have changed. Since it launched in May, the themes have shifted from the novelty of lockdown to the tragic consequences of the virus; at least three recent instalments feature mourning widows. They include Val McDermid’s First Things, in which Elaine C Smith gets the bland joviality of a radio phone-in host down to a tee, and Stewart Ennis’s A Soup Song, in which Ann Louise Ross touchingly learns to cook with her dead husband’s recipes. This kind of human detail is what future social historians will relish. Come back in 10 years for the V&A retrospective.
Watched right now, they can seem grimly close to home. If you are already feeling isolated, vulnerable and small, you’re unlikely to find solace in an inward-looking monologue. However vividly written, however crisply directed and however well acted (and there are many tremendous performances here), these works are often so overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis that there’s no room for imaginative escape.
At their best, though, they find ways to paint on a broader canvas. A case in point is the newly released first episode of Johnny McKnight’s Out of the Woods, in which Alan Cumming plays a father trying to visit his young daughter without telling his estranged partner, Neil.
Wittily pieced together from a sequence of video messages recorded in the woods on a hand-held phone, like an irreverent Blair Witch Project, the episode lurches from irritable to charming and back again with every edit. Too soon to say how it will play out over the next two episodes, but Cumming’s performance of a man who is half hapless techno-klutz and half Big Bad Wolf has a promising ambiguity.
Highlights elsewhere include Ian and Sheena, in which Richard Conlon and Gail Watson have fun reprising the am-dram roles they played in Robert Softley Gale’s hilarious My Left Right Foot: The Musical. Thanks to expert comic timing, Greg McHugh manages to make the apocalypse entertaining as “wee Davey fae Tynecastle,” the last man standing, in Naeb’dy. Similarly dark and funny is Douglas Maxwell’s Fatbaws, the best of the whole series, in which Peter Mullan does a superb anthropomorphic turn as a man feeding the birds – and the addict-like birds themselves.
Back in more serious territory, writer Michael John O’Neill shows an Alan Bennett-like gift for subtext in Sore Afraid, intelligently played by Maureen Beattie, while Rob Drummond brilliantly strips away the defences of an erring chief scientific officer in Larchview, a stunning performance by Mark Bonnar.
Scenes for Survival is available online.
