LUVVIES in lockdown
David Tennant and Michael Sheen (plus their real-life partners) star as bickering actors who insist the show must go on – even under quarantine
They’re two of Britain’s leading actors, who when we last saw them together successfully averted the apocalypse in the irreverent TV series Good Omens – so dealing with the current global pandemic should be a piece of cake for Michael Sheen and David Tennant.
They’ve been reunited in a new series, which offers a topical variation on the classic ‘show must go on’ story, especially tailored for the coronavirus lockdown.
In the scintillating, smart and seductively nuanced comedy-drama Staged, the two stars portray barely fictionalised versions of themselves, only a hair’s-breadth away from reality – very much in the brilliant semiimprovised style of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip.
It seems that Sheen and Tennant had been due to appear alongside one another on stage in a hotly awaited new production of Pirandello’s comic masterpiece Six Characters In Search Of An Author – until their preparations were brought to a halt by the social distancing regulations. No matter: this is the world of theatre.
The fiercely ambitious director is determined that nothing will stop the play, and the work resumes on Zoom. Cue a matchless peek into Sheen and Tennant’s very different lives while they’re shut away at home, interspersed with their constant verbal jostling and friendly rivalry as they rehearse together and chat online.
The deliciously believable script is spiced up with a peppering of forensically precise witty banter as the pair bicker about star billing on the poster, exchange advice on home schooling and compare their contrasting examples of amateur art.
The film-makers have stuck to the social distancing rules that place strict restrictions on fellow cast members, and inserted the pair’s real-life partners into the drama: Tennant’s wife Georgia (also series co-producer and once his co-star in Doctor Who) and Sheen’s girlfriend, Swedish TV presenter Anna Lundberg, with the couple’s baby daughter Lyra, to be heard off-camera though not seen.
We also learn how the stars’ thoughts have taken some bizarre turns while they’ve been cut off from the rest of the world: perhaps Sheen is right, and we should now be keeping a careful eye out for what all those birds out there are really up to…
Here are two sublimely gifted stars having the comic time of their performing lives, and you can enjoy the resultant finely crafted delights in six eminently digestible episodes of just 15 minutes each.