This short playlet is a perfect product of the Lockdowns in 2020 in its theme and its technical execution and the end result is an intriguing piece of drama. Taking its cue from the Willie Nelson song Always on my mind where he sings. “Maybe I didn’t love you, Quite as often as I could have, and maybe I didn’t treat you, quite as good as I should have”, the play explores a couple who have split up reconnecting after six months. It resonates as a living record of the time as so many couples must have found the strains of lockdown together, or apart, difficult to deal with and all of us have tried to connect with people over the ubiquitous Zoom call and found while it allows you to see and speak to each other it inhibits real communication.
Although this started as a four-person sixty-minute play it feels like it was written for the medium as two-hander socially distanced awkward first meeting after a painful breakup. If anything, it leaves you wanting a second and possibly third act as when their call together ends abruptly you really want to know what happened next. The devise for the online version of having an actor play themselves as well as their alter ego self-watching over their shoulder and revealing their real feelings works really well and would have been fascinating to explore this more in subsequent acts.
