There’s a special joy in seeing a familiar character in an unfamiliar place. Take John Rebus. Solitary curmudgeon he may be, but Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh detective is a man engaged in his world, be it the city mortuary or the Oxford bar. Take him out of that world, as Rankin does in John Rebus: The Lockdown Blues, and you have a character in search of definition.
Self-isolating during the Covid-19 crisis, this Rebus is left with nothing but memories, beer bottles and his record collection to fill the time between socially distanced visits from protege Siobhan. It’s simultaneously funny and sad.
Played by Brian Cox with the haunted look of a man in search of the microphone switch on Zoom, he hovers on the edge of existential despair. His whiskery beard is not a lockdown thing, he says, it’s “a cannae be arsed thing”. Like so many of us, he is someone whose very sense of self has been called into question by an isolation that reminds him all too much of a prison cell.
The short film is one of an initial six Scenes for Survival produced by the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine season. There are more than 40 in line to be released in batches three times a week. Like the Abbey theatre’s Dear Ireland series, they are already showing characteristics of the emerging form of lockdown monologue: the loneliness, the self-absorption, the pressures of living at close quarters with family members, the bittersweet reflections of people removed from the drama of public life.
Breaking the mould is Frances Poet with A Mug’s Game, which, despite being about face masks, takes us into different territory. An extract from her 2019 play Fibres, it is about a shipyard electrician paying the price for having had to work with asbestos at the start of his career. Reviving his original role, Jonathan Watson performs with tremendous sensitivity, giving a vox-pop realism to a character whose love of life trumps his bewildered sense of injustice. He is touching, tender and true.
The acting in all six instalments is first-rate. Moyo Akandé gives a living-room rhythm to the rhyming poetry of Stef Smith’s The Present, playing a woman mourning the loss of human touch and compensating with an unseasonal Christmas ritual.
In Morna Pearson’s Clearing, Ashleigh More is at once bolshie and vulnerable as a teenager bounced between separated parents, each too wrapped up in their own lives to care about her needs. Written in vivid Doric, it has Pearson’s characteristic qualities of the bleak, the abusive and the comic.
Kate Dickie brings a feverish intensity to Jenni Fagan’s Isolation, writhing on her sickbed as her focus ranges from the personal to the global. “I’m embarrassed by how ill I am,” she says, making mental connections between the herd of plastic animals at her feet and the dreamlike stories of creatures entering our cities.
Janey Godley’s contribution is called Alone, but hers is the closest we get to a two-hander thanks to the double act she performs with her sausage dog. The comedian celebrated for her tell-it-like-it-is voiceovers of political speeches, gives a clear-eyed view of domestic oppression and feminist awakening in that rare thing: a lockdown monologue with the prospect of a happy ending.
Scenes for Survival is available to watch on the National Theatre of Scotland website.
