The Key Workers Cycle: Part One review: It will renew your anger

This audacious four-day takeover about the people who got us through the pandemic gives a voice to those we often sentimentalise but too easily forget
The Funeral Directors’ Play
Ali Wright

This audacious four-day takeover of the Almeida - nine plays produced by a mashup of professional theatre-makers and community groups - puts rarely-heard voices in front of an audience. They belong to the teachers who kept children motivated in the face of the pandemic and the brutal Ofqual exam algorithm; those who drove the buses, delivered the parcels, took away the rubbish, and delivered the babies under lockdown.

Oh, and the carers we all clapped for – remember that? The Key Workers Cycle will bring back all sorts of memories from the last three years; some funny, many frightening and sad. The main emotion it stoked in me was renewed, furious anger that our leaders apparently partied while we buried our loved ones at socially distanced funerals, and now refuse to ease the cost of living crisis for key workers while awarding Gavin Williamson a knighthood.

The Teachers’ Play
Ali Wright

If the three plays of Part One, which received their first and only staging last night, were anything to go by, the criticism of authority throughout will be oblique and implied rather than direct. First up was Assembly by Sonali Bhattacharyya, where actors Doreene Blackstock and Jonny Khan led a cast of real teachers and pupils through an exploration of the disruption caused to state-school A-level students throughout 2020. It also packed quite a bit about ageism and the lack of unionisation in education into just over 30 minutes, as well as the delicious concept of kids orchestrating a classroom coughing campaign to a Kanye West track.

More focused and funny than this passionate but necessarily ragged piece was The Full Works by Josh Elliott, in which a father inducts his reluctant son into the family funeral trade with the help of a very chatty corpse. This was unexpectedly sweet and sad, the two living characters exchanging confidences and tricks of the trade while the dead young man’s bereft father waits outside.

The Social Care Workers' Play
Ali Wright

Finally, Face the Music was a fragmentary but delightful tip of the hat to carers by the cared-for. This mix of fairytale, song and mockingly recited soundbites (“they need to be protected”/”He’s grumpy”/“He REALLY likes to talk to the cashiers”) was devised by poet Francesca Beard with older members of the community arts group All Change. It showed their vulnerability and also their strength, with a show-stopping turn from 96-year-old Eula Harrison, who knows how to deliver a stone-cold punchline.

Part Two, playing tonight (Thur 10) and on Saturday afternoon, will feature plays about refuse collectors, midwives and delivery drivers. Part Three, on Friday and Saturday evening, will cover women’s centre workers and supermarket and TFL staff. Each tranche features estimable writers, actors and/or directors: they may also feature novices who will be inaudible and fluff their cues. But this is a laudable enterprise and one worth supporting. I salute it for giving a voice and a platform to those we sentimentalise but too easily forget.

Almeida Theatre, to March 12; almeida.co.uk

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