INTRODUCTION

WHEN COVID-19 HIT AND THE THEATRES SHUT WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO RESPOND.

All of a sudden we weren’t able to gather, everyone kept saying the word ‘unprecedented’, arts and culture ground to a halt—but something huge was happening that we wanted to talk about.

From our little fortresses of isolation, we wanted to hear from each other. We wanted to know how other people were coping, what they were experiencing. And so we conceived of a work that would draw out those stories. Our playwrights, Jane Harrison, Tom Holloway and Jean Tong spent weeks finding interview subjects, speaking to them, and then developing short monologue scripts to be performed online from actors’ homes. The work they created over a series of months has become a time capsule of how this virus and the experience of lockdown impacted ordinary people.

We started making The Lockdown Monologues thinking we would unearth explosive, wild stories, but as the writers worked they discovered that something else was coming to the surface—that in our collective containment and isolation there was a shared experience of pressure, uncertainty, and vulnerability. We didn’t know when we started this project that we would be living in this state for the greater part of 2020.

In this collection of nine works it’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic changed and continues to change us. We’re familiar with global change— natural disasters, wars, things that are quick, delineated, and visible. This was different. Being in lockdown gave us a moment to pause. It made people start looking back outwards at the world with greater clarity, greater conviction. Lockdown became an opportunity to see where we’ve come from, what’s missing, and to name the kind of society we each want to see when we come back out. There’s no doubt that we’re changing, that we have changed. This project was our attempt to capture that transformation as it was first occurring.

Bridget Balodis /

Director