Unprecedented

A brilliant play from Duncan Macmillan sees Katherine Parkinson try to persuade her parents – the always amazing Alison Steadman and Michael Elwyn - to take lockdown seriously. It features a screaming monologue against an older generation that eloquently and aggressively lays out all the frustrations of younger people about the state of society – no doubt it’ll be heard in audition rooms in years to come.

There’s particular joy, too, in April De Angelis’ play which features a group of neighbours getting together on House Party for drinks, each with a different middle class tipple – "a liqueur from the back of the cupboard", "a decent Sancerre", "some sort of IPA". It’s absolutely hilarious, partly because of the unstinting comic abilities of Fenella Woolgar and Cecilia Noble, but also from the brilliant direction by Holly Race Roughan, managing to perfect the thing that is so often absent from video calls: timing.

While some of the pieces are lighter and gentler, Prasanna Puwanarajah’s play, based on testimony from NHS staff in the middle of March, tugs things back to grim reality. “There’s fear fatigue in addition to actual fatigue,” says Rory Kinnear’s intensive care consultant. “And we’ve got anticipatory fatigue, planning fatigue, and the uncontrolled and the unknown...”

Of the nine I previewed, the play that sticks like a knife in the heart is a chilling contribution by Anna Maloney called Safer at Home, starring Gemma Arterton, Geraldine James and Rory Keenan. Arterton plays a woman being abused. The suspense, the intensity that it summons in eight minutes is astonishing, and a reminder of how horrifying lockdown has been for so many.