The Protest: Black Lives Matter
Bush Theatre YouTube Channel

After almost four months of all UK theatres being temporarily shut, the fear of several more major venues following the Nuffield Southampton into permanent closure finally persuaded the government to agree, on 6 July, after long resistance, a package of grants and loans to keep the cultural industry solvent. The £1.57 billion is very welcome although, with performance still outlawed, the next step is for politicians to explain why it is safe to sit with others on a plane but not at a play.

The continuing absence of live theatre is made additionally painful by reminders – through the online lockdown projects – of the artistic creativity and social contribution we are missing.

The Protest: Black Lives Matter, a set of six short digital pieces that the Bush Theatre in west London is streaming on YouTube, will be doubly useful to future historians as a record of the time, during the early summer of 2020, when two emergencies blurred. Whereas most dramas made so far in Covid-19 isolation have understandably dealt with the pandemic, these half-dozen works respond to the focus on the value of black lives following the protests caused by the suffocation of George Floyd, an African American, by a white Minneapolis policeman in late May.