Covid Requiem|
The Explorers’ Garden, Pitlochry Festival Theatre

THERE can be few contemporary plays that match the ambition of Covid Requiem, which premiered in Pitlochry Theatre’s Explorers’ Garden on the September 15 for just seven performances. It faces our common experience of bereavement in the pandemic; it welcomes our personal experiences of grief, it unblocks the audience, one by one, and resituates them in the collective.

How? Pick up a stone. Hold it in your hand. Carry it through the performance. Then choose to do something with it. Keep it, or place it. Say a name. Do so alongside other people whom you don't know, but become friends.

The performance moves at a slow walking pace through a natural woodland, accompanied by violin and guitar. We are in Scotland, and this version of the ritual draws on the lament of the Scottish folk tradition. Those familiar harmonies and rhythms are a subtle counterpoint to the changing moods of the promenade.

The score is very precise. We visit loss, sacrifice, anger, consolation and release. This is the personal loss that everyone feels, that is multiplied by millions. The sacrifice is that of all those who risked their lives to maintain our lives. The anger is at the callous squandering of life by those who profit from it in both politics and the economy.

To embrace this anger is important, and sets this requiem apart from religious ceremony. The consolation is that of finding your emotions acknowledged, and channeled towards healing in a way that is dignified, humanist and beautiful.

And finally — miraculously — release. The stone is grief. It is heavy as the unresolved grief that you carry and you are offered the chance to lay it down and say a name.

The genius of the event, written and performed by Jo Clifford and Lesley Orr, lies in its simplicity. They read words from a script and demonstrate how simple it would be for others, in another place, to do the same. The point is the big heart, not the actorly feat of memory.

In this way Covid Requiem redefines what theatre can be and changes the relationship of playwright, actor and spectator.

The words are precise and lucid and never twice the same. With each performance it welcomes the new and different stories that people bring of lives cut short. The actor’s role is to be present, and to accompany the audience. And the spectator looks not only outward, but inward. To have created a form that can objectify the emotional life of individual audience members is the radical achievement.

And it works. It deserves an infinite number of performances around the world. One can only hope that it becomes as successful as Clifford’s monologue Jesus, Queen of Heaven that was translated into Portuguese and revolutionised Brazilian theatre.

An 86-year-old woman confided in me as we walked away: “I left something in that garden. In a very good way …”

Ends today. Box office and enquiries: 01796 484626, [email protected]