Friends Chris (Chris Parker), Carrie (Carrie Green) and Andrew (Andrew Patterson) have gathered on a Zoom call, with drinks and snacks at the ready. A familiar sight from level 4’s challenging and social distancing times.

The lovely Simon (Simon Leary) pops in throughout, probably not needing a shirt under his apron because of all the time he’s spent by the oven baking. [More]

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In the time of serious Lockdown, Andrew (Patterson) hosts a Zoom drinks-and-catch-up with his friends Chris (Parker) and Carrie (Green), while putting up with the attentions of his very recent and ever-loving partner Simon (Leary). While they use their real names, and those of others in their bubbles – e.g. Brynley Stent is Chris’s flatmate – they are in role as character constructs who may contain traces of themselves but are otherwise fictitious. And wonderfully rendered they are, too.

Andrew is quickly established as a ‘breach monitor’ for the ‘team of five million’. Always on the watch for rule-breakers and quick to judge, he forces Chris into a bizarre justification of why he is wearing a wet puffer jacket. (Um, even in Level Four Lockdown, young healthy people were allowed to shop for groceries, weren’t they?)

Carrie is late to the meeting because as an ‘essential worker’ she has been doing her bit as a Clown Doctor. (Um again: while her circus clown make-up looks spectacular, Clown doctors just use a red nose and odd costume elements; that full-face make-up would freak children out at close quarters. I realise there is more to this story element than meets the eye. Even so …)  

The true-to-life inter-personal dynamics are amusingly provoked by such things as Carrie’s douche regime and exacerbated by their different responses to Simon: monster or treasure? He even treats them – and us – to a song he has written especially: “You can’t lockdown my love for you, Andrew…”

It’s Chris who comments on how weird it can get in Lockdown and tries to explain the strange things away. There are tensions below the sociable surface. When a bitter fight breaks out between him and Andrew, Carrie calls ‘Time Out’ and it is in the hiatus that follows that we, as viewers, become privy to the ‘real’ explanation for what has been happening in Chris’s kitchen. This is where Tane Upjohn-Beatson robust sound design comes into its own. 

Guilty secrets emerge in the foreground as spooky things happen in the background – hence the title. Indeed Chris’s furious rant – given free reign because he takes his Blue-Tooth earbuds out – about Andrew’s insufferable sanctimony and the whole accumulated horror of the Lockdown experience ends with the ‘famous last words’: “It’s all behind me now.” Just one example of the excellent writing by Ralph McCubbin Howell and Anya Tate-Manning.

The way it resolves, dramatically, seems to flip the popular notion that dealing with Covid-19 has made us a more caring community. It even raises the possibility that state control has gone too far. Or is it that a guilty conscience can rob us of our empathy and turn us into everyday sociopathic monsters? For those who want genres like Comedy Horror to go deeper that spooky thrills, then, It’s Behind You! delivers something to chew on.

A fully mastered rendition of ‘Lock Down My Heart’ – lyrics by McCubbin Howell, music by Upjohn-Beatson – accompanies the closing credits. And there is a visual coda, too, that’s worth waiting for. The excellent costume designs by Nell Williams are most in evidence with ‘The Monster’ – well played by Brynley Stent – and of course Hannah Smith earns the accolade for directing this latest example of theatre-by-Zoom.

[This online production is available until 30 July: Go to Circa Website page and ckick in Book Now]

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