A loveless lockdown
JAMES MCAVOY and Sharon Horgan play a couple who absolutely hate each other with a passion, but are staring down the barrel of lockdown.
Beginning on March 24, 2020, the first full day of national lockdown, the unnamed couple arrives home with their 10-yearold son Arthur.
“The only thing keeping us together is our child,” he says, talking to camera.
The whole thing is set up with both of them talking directly to the audience throughout, as if being interviewed or documenting their feelings.
Every so often, time skips forward a few months through the pandemic and we’re given a death toll update – and later, a vaccination count.
We know exactly what’s happening in the outside world, although the entire featurelength drama is set in the couple’s kitchen and watches their relationship evolve.
Funny and heartbreaking at the same time, they must not only survive together, but also face the reality of Covid.
She is a co-ordinator for all of Europe at a refugee charity, and the daughter of a dentist father and an ‘old socialist’ mother – the only grandparent still around.
He is a self-made man who runs a boutique computing consultancy, although no one really understands what he does. Meanwhile, little Arty mostly sits on the stairs listening to his parents fight and cry and debate as they deal with the pain and torment of the year. X-men and His Dark Materials star James says of the drama: “It’s a hilarious, heartfelt, entertaining and unconsciously funny exploration of a relationship and a couple facing real tragedy across a year we have all lived through.”