The Key Workers Cycle review – a tender collaboration to keep the darkness at bay | Theatre

For its latest show, the Almeida theatre in Islington, London, has looked back to its amateur origins for a template – the pageants by trade guilds that grew into the medieval mystery plays. Out of it has come a cycle of nine community pieces that will sing the song of key workers in trios over three nights, with the whole lot repeated on Saturday.

Day one gave us the teacher, the funeral director and the social care worker. A real-life teacher and school students bulk out the cast for the deftly choreographed opener, written by Sonali Bhattacharyya. It bounces between class and staffroom to show the impossible strain on schools, struggling to keep their students’ futures on track. “I’d have to tidy my room,” protests one boy, as Miss struggles to persuade him to switch his camera on for a virtual lesson. A familiar story is freshly shocking when seen as a single piece of choric witness, with staff and kids on the same side.

We’re slid into an altogether chillier ambience by a little gem of a black comedy written by Josh Elliott. A yuppie chats away in a barber’s chair while the jovial barber instructs his gangly assistant on how to administer a perfect shave. Except this is not a barber’s but a funeral parlour that is sprucing a young Covid victim up for a “meeting” with his grief-stricken father. Cleverly and tenderly it shows us the sort of care we will all one day need, even if we’d prefer not to think about it.

As the corpse is wheeled offstage he is passed by a parade of elders in their glad rags who present the care workers’ case, written by Francesca Beard. Fragments of song and shards of anecdotes are tossed between the 16 players, the oldest 96 years old, before they settle to a cautionary tale about who in our cut-throat society would be invited aboard Noah’s ark. The lucky few realise too late that the virus has set sail with them and there is nobody aboard who cares. This is campfire theatre, a precious, collaborative improvisation to keep the darkness at bay and remind us who we are. Tears, I shed a few.