The best online theatre: What Do We Need to Talk About?; Dear Ireland; Sea Wall; The Ruins of Empire – review

The theatres have been dark – in that terrible, expressive phrase – for two months. No fleshy audience and fleshy cast in the same space in the same irrecoverable time. In their place, ingenious simulacra: a bombardment of Zooming, YouTubing, radio drama. And an acute focus on pandemic.

The murder of George Floyd brought new work of this kind to a temporary halt on both sides of the Atlantic. It caused some theatres to examine what they were up to, and what they might achieve. In London, the artistic director of the Bush, Lynette Linton, postponed the release of new content, while pledging to “keep using our platform to represent black communities”. In New York, the Public Theater cancelled the virtual celebration planned under the title “We Are One Public”. Directors Oskar Eustis and Kenny Leon spoke of anguish and anger, and of the need to “do better”: to embody the fight against what Eustis called “our national epidemic – racism”.

Meanwhile the Public showed the best example of zoom theatre I have watched so far. Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About? continues his Rhinebeck Panorama, a saga about the Apple family which has been staged with the same cast over the last 10 years : they were last seen together in 2014.

The now middle-aged set of sibs (and one partner) meet on Zoom: four screens, with five faces, the setup subtly complicated as two of the characters live together but are having to self-isolate, while two who share a screen are in real life a married couple. The talk is partly inconsequential and partly structured on The Decameron: at a time of plague, people take it in turns to tell stories. A family secret is unveiled; an unexpected interpretation of The Cherry Orchard (more about parental loss than property) is offered, along with a haunting tale of a pseudonymous author.

Incidents land with the weight of the past behind them. Nothing is overplayed – each actor could give a masterclass in pointed reticence. Yet an anxious look or a quizzical aside glances at a shared history. Though Zooming now, the play reaches backwards in time. The voice of a dead uncle is played on a mobile phone: you see his tones striking each face. A walk through a graveyard is mentioned and with it the smallest of mentions of a daughter who has died. When a woman is complimented on her scarf (“I dressed up”), you hear long echoes of a family used to noticing each little change in each other.

Flatness always lies in wait for covideos. Yet What Do We Need to Talk About? is alive with small movements. It is not merely that every face is constantly reacting (or carefully not reacting). One sister is always eating. Another sends her brother to fetch her phone from her coat – so that suddenly space opens up beyond the screen: a future is glimpsed beyond this trap.

Nowhere can they be missing an audience more than in Dublin. Going to any play with predominantly Irish spectators – or engagers – guarantees an extra surge of energy in a theatre. It is no surprise that one of the biggest lockdown projects comes from the Abbey. Dear Ireland, monologues written by 50 playwrights, each performed by a different actor, played over four days. There is teeming talent: Dermot Bolger, Edna O’Brien, Kit de Waal. There is potato blight, family feuding, tumbling syntax. There is rather less shape. There can be no interaction between these varieties of isolation: howls, negotiations, rhapsodies. Watched as a mass – one single voice drilling on after another – the effect is relentless.

Like most pandemic drama, it risks Zoomface: of coming so close to its material that it ends up distorting it, like those features which as they lean into the camera look as if they belong to dolphins. The most telling pieces come at their subjects sideways, refreshing the eyes with something other than a bedroom (it will be a long time before I want to see a bedstead on stage again), and examining pain or relief while apparently distracted. A beautiful piece by McCafferty features Patrick O’Kane, bleak on a beach, running through a shopping list like a mercantile rosary, while he waits for news – and claps alone against the waves. Sarah Hanly’s Shower, in which Denise Gough, slumped in a tracksuit, chats on the phone to a plumber, desperate for water, shrewdly dispels only drops of information about harsh times, making the most of Gough’s ability to transmit depletion while energising an audience. Shane O’Reilly’s terrific, imaginative Windowpane comes with thanks to “the Irish deaf community”. Behind a suburban window, ingeniously reflecting passersby, Amanda Coogan signs eloquent descriptions of her puffed-sleeve wedding dress, her estranged sister, how she has been “busy like a squirrel” – and furious. You hardly need the subtitles.

There have been some completely unexpected gifts from lockdown. Having missed it first time around, I tried hard but could not get a ticket for the second run of Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall: no critics were necessary. I had heard it was compelling. and there was an undisclosed mystery about the plot, which made it the more intriguing. In any case who wouldn’t want to see Andrew Scott, for whom it had been written? This was before Fleabag but after his extraordinary, vibrating Hamlet.

Now I have seen it. Not of course in a fleshy version, but as a very good film. Scott has probably got most stage acclaim for his orchidaceous performance in Present Laughter. That was worth applause. But here that he shows at a stroke his intricacy and his emotional depth.

He does so in one of Stephens’s most keenly observed, far-reaching plays. It makes a hefty point about the way lives change: the title suggests a metaphor that is never laboured. It glan During Covid, for obvious reasons, monologue has become the default position for online drama. It has always carried possibilities of disruption: the Royal Court were making fine feminist use of it before lockdown but it is hard to avoid imperious self-indulgence. Sea Wall is rare in carrying within it a world as well as a voice. An altogether different direction is taken in Akala’s The Ruins of Empire – anti-tyranny, hip-hop poetry, game-engine animation, astral travel, reincarnations – a monologue dancing in front of a chorus of other figures, and a conscious reaching out beyond a white political consensus. Both are far more than holding operations before the stage can return to being sociable. And public.

Star ratings (out of five)
What Do We Need to Talk About? ★★★★★
Dear Ireland ★★★
Seawall ★★★★
Akala Presents: The Ruins of Empire ★★★

• What Do We Need to Talk About is available at publictheater.org; Dear Ireland at abbeytheatre.ie; Sea Wall at seawallandrewscott.com