Janet Christie

The country’s creative talent are all in lockdown like the rest of us but that hasn’t stopped them making a welcome drama out of the corona crisis. With theatres closed, they are responding to Covid-19 in the way they do best; writing, acting, filming remotely and working in collaboration to release their work online in the shape of Scenes for Survival, the National Theatre of Scotland’s digital response to the crisis.

Launched this week it was created in association with BBC Scotland, Screen Scotland, BBC Arts’ Culture in Quarantine project and theatre venues and companies, with support from Hopscotch Films, and has already seen short pieces broadcast from writers Janey Godley, Jenni Fagan, Morna Pearson, Ian Rankin and Stef Smith, as well as an extract from Frances Poet’s Fibres.

Each is made by a quarantine creative team, connecting remotely, comprising a performer(s) – including Brian Cox, Kate Dickie, Moyo Akandé, Ashleigh More, Janey Godley, and Jonathan Watson, many filming themselves at home.

Jackie Wylie, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland says, “In Scotland during times of crisis we have always turned to our storytellers to offer connectivity, solace and joy. We want to bring audiences together online despite our collective isolation.”

A showcase of homegrown talent, there will be more than 40 films in total, all free, released over the coming weeks and months and a selection will also be broadcast on BBC Scotland, BBC4 and BBC Alba.

As well as entertaining us, and encouraging new ways of working, the shorts will help raise funds for the industry’s struggling workforce, many of them freelance, through the new Scenes For Survival Hardship Fund.

“These stories begin to help us understand the times we are living through and how to collectively imagine our futures. We hope that audiences will find some joy, shared community and solace in watching these Scenes whilst raising funds for theatre workers in need,” says Wylie.

“We will all feel changed by what we have been through and it is theatre that will allow us to imagine, with hope, where we are going to find ourselves and how it will feel. Theatre matters, more than ever.”

Here four of the artists involved give us an insight into isolation and their Scene for Survival.