CREDIT is due to Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT) for being one of the founders of Sound Stage, a podcast drama platform created in response to the closure of theatres by the Covid pandemic.
The playhouses may have opened their doors again, but there is something appropriate about the online broadcasts of Blaccine: The First Dose, a series of three monologues, hosted by Sound Stage, which contemplate the Black experience of the pandemic and the vaccine programme.
Created by London theatre company Stockroom and co-produced with PFT, the pieces premiered last Thursday, and will be broadcast online again on January 19 and 26 (ticketed at £8).
In Brixton Royalty, a monologue by Isaac Tomiczek, our Black, mixed-race protagonist (played with engaging energy by Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer) goes through a number of the stages of grief in his relationship with the ever-changing area of south-west London in which he was raised.
Here, the Covid “vaccine hesitancy” within Black communities in the UK – which was widely reported (but barely illuminated) in the mass media – is woven subtly into a complex social tapestry.
A working-class, Black Brixtonian (recently moved to nearby Peckham), our protagonist, finds that Brixton has plenty of other viruses to contend with, not least social inequality and gentrification.
In The Process by Maheni Arthur, we hear a Black woman (played compellingly by Femi Tiwo) place her vaccine concerns in historical, social and personal contexts.
As she is pushed towards vaccination – not by medical persuasion, but by travel prohibitions for the unvaccinated – her experience of society under Covid becomes inextricably intertwined with the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement following the racist murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Tonderai Munyevu’s Trigger Warning (performed by the excellent Stefan Adegbola) is, for my money, the most interesting of the three monologues.
In this piece, our protagonist (a Black, Zimbabwean writer and queer man living in the UK) is “triggered” by a report in a respected, liberal newspaper which stated, baldly, that 72% of Black people in the UK were unlikely to take a Covid vaccine.
There was, our protagonist observes, with unarguable indignation, “no why” in this article, no explanation of why Black people – who have so many reasons to be suspicious of the motivations of the British state – might be vaccine-hesitant.
In a short monologue, Munyevu’s writing is dense and witty (not least when our protagonist observes that “the Black Lives Matter movement had reminded the white gatekeepers [in publishing] that I was a Black writer for hire”).
Incorporating comments from Black people taken in interviews on the streets of Brixton, the piece is a thought-provoking and captivating audio drama.
Taken together, these monologues open one of many vital windows on to Black experience of the pandemic and of UK society more broadly. They also stand as credit to Stockroom, as a writers’ theatre, and Sound Stage as an online drama project.
Blaccine: The First Dose can be heard online at 7pm on January 19 and 26: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
