Available online
The experience of black frontline workers in the Covid crisis is brought to harrowing life in these plays based on interviews with a teacher and mental health worker
As the Covid-19 crisis raged this summer, Talawa theatre company began talking to black frontline workers. They interviewed the people we encounter most days, whose stories we rarely hear: teachers, train workers, hospital and supermarket staff. The first two plays to be released, for an online series based on those verbatim interviews, are quite often pained and sometimes bitter. A mental health worker is riled by the weekly clap for NHS workers (“it’s just a performance”); a teacher is dismayed by the lack of black doctors or nurses seen in news footage when there are so many in the workforce. Both speak of everyday racism.
But the monologues are not just about expressing anger at systemic injustice. They are miniature character studies, rich in insight and individual detail. They reveal a person and a life, as well as giving a depth of meaning to the high rates of Covid-related deaths among people of colour in Britain.