As theatres reopen, it is becoming apparent how online drama has developed over the past year. Remember the Pillow Period? When it seemed that all scenes were shot in front of a bedstead? Gone. Remember the Monologue Age? That’s over too. Nottingham Playhouse’s collection of short digital plays, nimbly directed by Adam Penford and Matthew Xia, shows how far we have come. It supplies more than theatrical methadone.
Still Life confidently recognises that local does not mean limited. Filmed and set in different parts of Nottingham, the five plays are based on citizens’ experiences: they are precise, looking at some effects of the pandemic without the mooning inwardness of early lockdown dramas. Olu Alakija gives a shaded account of misogyny from wolf whistle to domestic violence: strongly acted by Conor Glean and Karl Haynes, it is also a neat demonstration of how you might characterise a man by his sandwiches.
Emteaz Hussain’s taxi-driver playlet is very funny about pongs and voms on the back seat, while subtly touching in unexpected ways on snobbery and racism. There is a sad but brisk study by Nathan Ellis of what isolation has done to an 11-year-old girl struggling at school. Julie Hesmondhalgh is soaring as an actor. Last week she starred in BBC One’s The Pact and triumphed on stage in Hull. She is extraordinary here – desolate but determined, as a volunteer in a cafe attached to a food bank: every line of Amy Guyler’s play sounds like the most eloquent vox pop.
Alan Bennett’s contribution is only a couple of minutes long: as much jab as play. Yet it is so cleverly turned and so finely acted by Frances de la Tour – swinging from droll to drooping – that it will immunise anyone from ever again mistaking the gleam in this dramatist’s eye for a kindly twinkle. It is called Muriel – and makes me long for Bennett to write another play. It would be based on one of the women who persisted in loving Philip Larkin. It would be set in newly fashionable Leicester and called Monica.
