How do I live with myself if someone gets hurt because of my mistake?
What a way to return to the theatre after months of forced abstinence. In the Playhouse Summer 2021 pamphlet, Under the Mask is fittingly described as a ‘unique theatrical experience’, and this reviewer would very much be inclined to agree with that summary. The audience are led through the pleasantly dimmed auditorium to the stage itself and invited to choose from a selection of seats, all individually lit and facing in seemingly random directions (some, unnervingly, facing each other). Headphones are donned and the theatregoer is treated to an almost meditative test loop of statements to ensure all is well, technically, and the play can begin.
What follows is 55-minutes of a fully immersive audio performance, providing a glimpse into the early days of the Covid pandemic from a unique perspective. While this devastating virus may still be a part of the present, Shaan Sahota’s debut play, directed by Sita Thomas, takes us back to March 2020 (which seems like an aeon ago), following just one “small story” of freshly qualified doctor Jaskaran’s hellish initiation not only into her new profession, but to the noisy and panic-inducing trenches of the Covid-ICU. As a junior doctor herself, Sahota is writing from her own lived experience, and she successfully navigates the complex mixture of emotions that must have been (and probably continue to be) so prominent in that generation of medical students.
Subtle yet effective lighting changes which seem to sweep across the stage are combined with a 360-degree binaural experience that draws the audience into all aspects of Jaskaran’s life, the claustrophobia of the PPE, the intensity of the scenes witnessed on the Covid ward she is deployed to, as well as an insight into her changing home life. Sahota’s script is performed with nuance and tenderness by the six cast members, led brilliantly by Aysha Kala who’s portrayal of Jaskaran puts the audience directly into her shoes; her earnestness as she starts her new role quickly working through the breathless fear at the terrible newness of the situation she has been thrust into. While the lighting and acting are certainly integral factors to the power of this performance, it is Farokh Soltani’s sound design that really takes centre stage. Much of the soundscape was recorded on location in hospital wards and it is this authenticity that really packs a punch. The beeping ventilators, hurried footsteps and tortured wheezing of Covid patients seems to build to a dreadful crescendo and is only bearable with the interspersion of brief periods of calm; the clipped banality of medical-speak and especially when Jaskaran is listening to guided meditation after her shifts.
While the focus of this Tamasha and Oxford Playhouse co-production is on Jaskaran’s experience of the pandemic frontline, it also manages to touch upon racism and religion, and it is Jaskaran’s Sikhism that brings a note of hopeful optimism to the performance, and while I may have come out of the theatre feeling emotionally overwhelmed, it is that optimism which will stay with me.