Every week, a new catastrophe: on the day that Boris Johnson announced plans for the reopening of pubs and cinemas, but did not mention theatres, the Theatre Royal Plymouth announced that it was beginning redundancy consultations, with more than 100 jobs likely to vanish.
Every week, dramatic ingenuity. When the Bush theatre asked six black British artists to respond to the killing of George Floyd, the results, collectively called The Protest, were varied, disturbing, urgent. Matilda Ibini supplied advice to her younger self: don’t try to please. Kalungi Ssebandeke raps to footage of confrontations between police and protesters. Fehinti Balogun shows, in a text-message conversation, a white friend slithering away from acknowledging privilege. Roy Williams provides a graphic study of what it is to be terrorised: speaking Williams’s words, Aaron Pierre’s face seems to have been pushed out from within, swollen with grief and fear.
Together these videos are invaluable: an immediate record of what it is to live in savage times. Two tackle the difficulty of telling the truth plainly. Anoushka Lucas explains how much easier it is to sing her anger than to speak it. Benedict Lombe talks of the pressure to turn pain into something poetic. This smoothing of experience into art is one of the subjects of Rockets and Blue Lights which, taking off from JMW Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, begins by asking how something so fine can have so dreadful a theme, and goes on to point out how often in Britain the story of abolition becomes a story about heroic abolitionists. The world premiere of Winsome Pinnock’s play, which was to have opened at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in March, is part of the actor Bertie Carvel’s Lockdown theatre festival, in which plays whose run was cut off by Covid are transferred to Radios 3 and 4.
These are not merely recorded and transmitted: they are newly produced, with the actors turning their kitchens and bedrooms into makeshift studios. The director Miranda Cromwell was at first worried that Pinnock’s play, which has a cast of 25 and switches between 1840 and 2007, would be confusing without visual guides. I would like to have seen Laura Hopkins’s Manchester design – the big stretch of the play across time and place is such a challenge – but the broadcast version is a good ad for that neglected form, the radio play. The creak of sails and some (very unjaunty) shanties mesh centuries and incidents: Turner tries to defend his investment in a sugar plantation; a 21st-century black actress finds her movie role diminished, the viewpoint skewed to that of a white man; a woman who has been traded as a slave tells how she was made to cut out her baby’s tongue. The present is branded by history and memory. “They used to have the slave codes,” one character explains. “Now they have the equality guidelines.”
Lockdown has made pantheists of us all. You can see the love affair with the pastoral on Instagram, where even an urbanite like me is obsessed with poking her face into a peony. This should be the ideal moment for a mystical exploration of place. Which has been one of the great themes of the veteran white playwright David Rudkin, most celebrated for his 1962 play Afore Night Come. In PlacePrints, he offers a series of aural meditations, conjuring up areas in the British Isles in which the past seems to glimmer through the landscape: Boudica bobs up at a crossroads; a crusader holds forth in a church; on a walk to a sacred site, each harebell and cowslip is seen in microscopic detail, as if their images are developing in a photographic plate. Inanimate objects come to life; the narrators include a lough, a truck and, in Eyam, the plague.
A visionary ambition drives the project but Jack McNamara’s production, overladen with words, is peculiarly short of interesting noises: it might be a cultural essay from the Radio 3 of 20 years ago. Light slants, plants quiver and a wonderful cast, which includes Toby Jones, Michael Pennington and Stephen Rea, are frequently hushed and hallowed. Still, Juliet Stevenson brings wryness to a piece of unenviable casting. She plays a Saxon earthworks.
Charlie Ward deftly shows how a soundscape can replace a swathe of words, and seem to argue with what is being seen. Sound&Fury’s 20-minute show was first staged in 2014, in a makeshift hospital tent with an audience of 10 lying on beds. It is now streamed, with the suggestion that it be viewed and listened to in a darkened room. This truly is an immersive show, recreating the experience of a wounded soldier in a second world war hospital ward, where Charlie Chaplin movies were played to boost the morale of troops. Chaplin’s By the Sea – banana-skin and bowler-hat jokes – flickers (on the ceiling, if you have a projector) between the pathetic and the sinister. The internal life is in the sound. The screen goes black as the soldier’s mind – ours – is washed by memories: his mother’s voice as she tucks him up, the lapping of waves as he plays on the beach, the sound of guns, a shouted warning, an explosion. Short, lucid and unforgettable.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Protest ★★★★
Rockets and Blue Lights ★★★★
PlacePrints ★★
Charlie Ward ★★★★
The Protest is available on YouTube; Rockets and Blue Lights on BBC Sounds; PlacePrints on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify; Charlie Ward at fueltheatre.com
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