The Space: Surgeons Hall. 12.25pm
SwanWing Productions
Know Before You Go: Occasional explicit sexual content - maybe don't go with parents!
Love, Loneliness, and Lockdown. This play is the embodiment of everything we have been through over the past months. Six actors present pocket-sized sketches of life in a pandemic: desperate online dating, strained relationships, mental health on the rocks, and even a woman on the verge of insanity talking to her car. These intertwining stories are endearing, touching, and certainly relatable.
"Love, Loneliness, and lockdown. This play is the embodiment of everything we have been through over the past months."
We see 18 stories of people just like us, struggling with romance, friendship, and general human connectivity – a challenge all too familiar as we emerge from lockdown. It was an ambitious project for a 60-minute Fringe slot but they pulled it off. One moment stood out beyond the other sketches – an out-of-work actor clutching an iron in her hand and gazing out in the distance says: I have an “iron in my hand and Lady Macbeth in my heart”. This play was not all pandemic gloom as humour was impressively woven into the stories and it really was an hour’s testament to the resilience of humanity when deprived of the love we so crave.
"These intertwining stories are endearing, touching, and certainly relatable."
(Love in the Time of Lockdown- SwanWing Productions)
"It really was an hour’s testament to the resilience of humanity when deprived of the love we so crave."
Prepare yourself to hear all the lockdown phrases which have become all too common in these *unprecedented times*; concepts that you’ve heard so much of at the kitchen table that it is almost distressing to witness them in the dazzling spotlight of the Fringe. It was perhaps too soon for such a performance. Many of us have only just buried the harrowing image of care home deaths and the months of acute loneliness and now, on a joyous trip to the Fringe to celebrate the return of live theatre, we must face these uncomfortable truths once again.
Having said that, this is a good Fringe show and successfully does exactly what was advertised. However, it is not a top recommendation because it just feels too soon for a distinctly obvious pandemic play with such raw material.