Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Where were you five years ago? The chances are you can answer that without thinking. Huge numbers of us were at home, dealing with a world that had suddenly shrunk to four walls and a daily walk. Others, of course, were on the front line, tackling an invisible and unpredictable enemy.James McDermott’s play plunges us back into the Covid-19 lockdown period, tracing the experience of one British couple in their late fifties, Anne and Don. When we first meet them, it’s March 2020 and they are staring in disbelief at their television set as UK prime minister Boris Johnson lays out the new rules of social conduct. Soon they have slotted into a new routine: she, as an NHS administrator, is working from home; he, as the proprietor of a vintage shop, finds himself with time on his hands.In a string of very short scenes, McDermott traces a path familiar to many — applying for furlough payments, getting to grips with online meetings, dodgy self-administered haircuts, the row over the infamous drive to Barnard Castle “to test his eyesight” by government adviser Dominic Cummings.But, as the weeks turn into months, McDermott also weaves in the grim rising tally of deaths and many of the other dark issues of the period: increased drinking, domestic violence, the strain on mental health, the anxious conversations with sick relatives via phone, and vaccine hesitancy. Annie, being a health worker, urges Don to get jabbed when he is called up; he refuses. Then he gets Covid.The play offers a pithy, accurate reminder of the progress of the pandemic and its impact on ordinary people. It’s very well delivered by Kacey Ainsworth and Liam Tobin in Scott Le Crass’s production, deftly tracking the shifting nature of their relationship as confinement reveals how far apart they have grown. The banter gives way to bickering, the bickering to something much uglier. But at 75 minutes, it feels pretty skimpy, skating across many huge issues without examining any of them in real complexity and depth. Perhaps the most surprising of these, given the play’s title, is Don’s anti-vax attitude, which basically amounts to the sort of comments you might encounter online. Given how hot the topic is in the US again now, and given the vast and difficult problem of online conspiracies and contested truths, this could have been a really meaty subject to explore. In the end, the play reminds us of what that period felt like, and of the social and moral issues it exposed, without digging into the enduring significance of those problems.★★★☆☆To April 26, parktheatre.co.uk
