Alan Cumming in Out of the Woods, NTS, Johnny McKnight

The Guardian 4 Aug 2020

DURING the Covid crisis, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has been collecting what it calls Pandemic Objects: artefacts that have taken on new significance in our changed lives. Let’s hope its remit includes archiving Scenes for Survival, a collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and the BBC, now more than halfway through its 50-odd digital responses to life under lockdown. Many of these short commissions seem not only like plays for today but plays for tomorrow.

Viewed from afar, they will become time capsules, bottling an era when play parks were cordoned off, key workers were celebrated yet exploited and a visit from the postie was a social highlight of one’s week. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).