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    Britain Wonders, Is It Too Soon to Dramatize the Pandemic?

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    A new Sky Atlantic mini-series, “This England,” depicts the early days of Covid-19 in the country, with Kenneth Branagh playing Boris Johnson.LONDON — In the final moments of the new mini-series “This England,” Boris Johnson, the exhausted and embattled British prime minister, stares bleakly out of a window at 10 Downing Street and falls back, as he often does, on Shakespeare.“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,” says Johnson, who is played by Kenneth Branagh in the series, a six-part drama about Britain’s ordeal with the coronavirus pandemic.“We usually leave it there, you know,” he says, turning to his anxious wife, Carrie (Ophelia Lovibond), who is cradling their newborn child. “Forget the rest.”But Johnson goes on to recite the end of John of Gaunt’s deathbed soliloquy from “Richard II,” with its damning reproach of the king. “That England, that was wont to conquer others,” he says, “hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”It is a fitting coda to a much-talked-about show in Britain, a series that captures the everyday heroism of Britons during the pandemic, but also the failings of their leaders and how those failings contributed to a dilatory response that arguably deepened the nation’s suffering and led to needless additional deaths.“This England,” which debuted with solid ratings on Wednesday on Sky Atlantic in Britain, chronicles, almost day-by-day, how the first wave of the pandemic swept across the country. To many, the timing is curious, given that the latest wave of the virus hasn’t even ebbed yet.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first Covid-19 wave had rampaged across the country.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticMichael Winterbottom, the British documentary filmmaker who wrote the script with Kieron Quirke, said that he viewed the show as a “mosaic of many people’s experiences,” from those of Johnson and his advisers to those of doctors and nurses — and, above all, of the dying — in the overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes.“The goal was to be human and, I think, humane,” Winterbottom said in a joint interview with Branagh. “To honor and acknowledge this incredible, painful loss.” For all the government’s confusion and missteps, he added, “There was a sense that everybody was doing their best.”Yet inevitably, “This England” shows people falling short. Caught in the fog of a mysterious illness, some in government, like Johnson, initially underestimated the risk. Others were compelled to make bad personal choices, like the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who drove 260 miles, in breach of lockdown, to visit his family as the virus struck.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first wave had rampaged across the country, and the desperate scenes in ambulances and hospital intensive care units have an anguished immediacy. Much of the commentary about the show in Britain has focused on whether it’s too soon to dramatize all of this.Nearly 300 people died of Covid-19 in England in the seven days ending on Sept. 17; more than 4,000 were admitted to hospitals. The government is still pleading with people to get their booster shots. Johnson was drummed out of office only two months ago after a scandal over parties at Downing Street that violated lockdown rules.The outcry over the parties does not figure in the film, which ends instead with the misbegotten road trip Cummings made to his parents’ house in the north of England after his wife contracted Covid. This abridged timeline led The Financial Times to declare that the show “pulls off the unusual feat of feeling simultaneously premature and dated.”When the series opens, Johnson’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), is pregnant.Phil Fisk/Sky Atlantic“This England” has also had to contend with a torrent of other news. Sky pushed back the series by a week after the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, which plunged the country into 10 days of mourning. It premiered at a time when the government of Johnson’s replacement, Liz Truss, caused a run on the pound by announcing a plan to cut taxes despite double-digit inflation.Winterbottom acknowledged that the show was a first cut and that some might prefer the cooler perspective that comes with distance, which might be found in future books or films about the pandemic. But his goal was to make a kind of diary of a national trauma, he said. “By being close,” he noted, “you’re able to get a fresher view.”The other big debate is over Branagh’s performance as Johnson. The actor, a 61-year-old Oscar-winner, wore a blonde wig, prosthetics and padding to assume the 58-year-old politician’s shambling appearance.Some critics praised Branagh for nailing Johnson’s propulsive gait and peculiar diction. Another dismissed it as an impersonation that recalled the puppets on “Spitting Image,” a British TV show that satirized public figures of the 1980s and ’90s.Branagh, who has played real-life figures including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the German SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, said that he and the writers had debated how closely he should try to mimic Johnson. They concluded that the former prime minister was too vivid in people’s minds to stray far from the O.G.“With somebody so prominently in the public eye,” Branagh said, “I think it’s harder to serve to an audience something that is very, very different — that is stylized and abstract.”The series shows Johnson initially underestimating the risk posed by the coronavirus.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo plumb Johnson’s interior life, Branagh said that he had read all the former prime minister’s books, including his biography of Winston Churchill, as well as his newspaper columns for The Daily Telegraph. He came to see Johnson as a kind of “poet-politician,” ambitious and combative, but also emotionally separated from those around him by the crushing weight of his job.That translated to the production. “I didn’t really have small talk with other actors,” Branagh recalled. “It was as if there was already a sense that you must be burdened, and if you are burdened, you must be left alone.”Branagh watched footage of Johnson hustling through the House of Commons to capture his distinctive forward-leaning posture. He said that he had been especially struck by a video in which Johnson, then the mayor of London, runs down a 10-year-old boy while playing rugby during a visit to Japan. “This barreling-forward intensity, almost unstoppable, is just part of the propulsion,” Branagh said.But “This England” also offers a sympathetic portrayal of a harried man with a tangled personal life. Between crisis meetings and late-night awakenings to soothe his crying baby, Johnson is depicted as plaintively leaving voice mail messages for his adult children. It suggests a painful rift after Johnson divorced his second wife, Marina, and moved in with Carrie, who worked as a Tory Party communications aide.“This England” also captures the cramped, claustrophobic work environment in Downing Street, which doubles as the prime minister’s home and the headquarters of the British government. There are tracking shots of aides walking and talking about urgent matters of state, which recall the Aaron Sorkin series “West Wing.” The close quarters nearly became deadly after Johnson himself contracted Covid and wound up in an intensive care unit for three days.Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo the extent that there are heroes and villains, the show clearly puts Cummings in the black hat category. Played by Simon Paisley Day, he is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Winterbottom said that the producers had reached out to all the principals to gather their accounts.When the show takes the camera out of Downing Street, “This England” abruptly shifts from a political procedural to a tragedy. There are many scenes in hospitals and nursing homes, some of which were filmed in a real nursing home with actual residents and nursing staff, who were essentially re-enacting their experiences.“Our starting point was to make everything as accurate as possible, as authentic as possible,” Winterbottom said.It adds up to a heartbreaking depiction of the pressure on health workers, and the fear, pain and often lonely deaths of those hooked up to ventilators. By the final episode, it is easy to understand why a tormented Johnson would stand at a window, peer into a cold dawn and mourn how a disease had conquered his “sceptered isle.” More

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      Daniella Topol of Rattlestick Theater’s New Calling: Nursing

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      The artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is making an unusual career change after preparing the company for a major renovation.There’s been a lot of turnover in theater leadership lately. Some have been drummed out of their jobs. Others have quit to do something else in the arts. Many have retired.Daniella Topol, the artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and a career-long theater director, is leaving to become a nurse.The unusual move arrives at a pivotal time for Rattlestick, a small Off Broadway company that, in addition to rejuvenating following the long pandemic shutdown, is about to embark on a much-needed renovation of its cozy but imperfect West Village home, located in a 19th-century church parish house.Topol, 47, has been leading Rattlestick since 2016, succeeding David Van Asselt, who co-founded the company. Just before assuming the leadership position, she directed at Rattlestick a production of “Ironbound” by Martyna Majok, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for “Cost of Living.”Marin Ireland played a Polish immigrant in New Jersey in Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound,” directed by Topol for Rattlestick in 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThree years later, another production Topol directed at Rattlestick altered her trajectory. While working on “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play that both chronicled and mourned the demise of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village as patrons moved from location to location connected to the story, she consulted with nurses and nursing students, and something sparked.“A seed was planted and then we continued forward — a pandemic happened six months after that, and there was a lot of reflection around, ‘Where are we as a field?’ ‘Where are we as a city?’ ‘Where are we as a country?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What role do we play or not play?’ ‘How do I as white woman hold power and privilege?’ ‘How don’t I?’ ‘Where do I fit in a constellation in a way that is productive?’” she said. “I have been doing, obviously, a lot of reflection about my own personal life, and meaningful and challenging experiences that I have had, on a very personal level, and many of them have centered inside of maternal care complexities, and so it sort of felt like it was aligning with the stars.”She said she is not sure exactly what she wants to do as a nurse, but she plans to stay in New York, and said that maternal health and birth equity — a term used to describe efforts to reduce racial and class inequities for new mothers and their infants — have become particular interests, intensified by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I’ve been pregnant many times — I’ve had a late-term loss, early term losses, and I have a child,” said Topol, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. “I feel like it’s a way to hold the loss and let that help inform my next steps on a very personal level.”Ensemble members in “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play marking the death of St. Vincent’s Hospital. “A seed was planted,” Topol said of her work on this 2019 production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo now, while preparing to direct a final play for Rattlestick this fall and working on other theater projects, she is taking prerequisite courses and volunteering at a hospital; Rattlestick is beginning a search for her successor, and she hopes that she will overlap with that person and then leave sometime next year, before starting nursing school next summer or fall.“I’ve only been a theater person,” she said. “Here I am, I’m waking up at 4:30 a.m. to study science and memorize muscles and bones and I’m dissecting a pig. It’s all kinds of things I never thought I would do.”Topol said there were other factors as well. She said that she has thought about “how long should anybody stay in any kind of leadership position,” and that the civil rights unrest of 2020 had intensified that thinking: “Part of the reckoning was about who is running companies, where does power lay, and how much power sharing is there — defining what the trajectory of the field is.”“There are other wonderful artists who can take over Rattlestick and do a beautiful job leading it and imagine things I haven’t been able to imagine,” she added.As the paths of Topol and Rattlestick diverge, she’s interested in highlighting the theater’s survival and growth, and its commitment to a smooth transition.Dael Orlandersmith in her one-woman show “Until the Flood,” which was produced at Rattlestick in 2018 during Topol’s tenure.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe company, founded in 1994, is small — its annual prepandemic budget was $1.2 million, of which 80 percent was raised from foundations and donors — but has consistently attracted attention for its ambitious work, including not only Majok’s early play, but also work by Annie Baker, Samuel D. Hunter, Dael Orlandersmith and Heidi Schreck. The theater describes its mission, in part, as prompting “social change,” and much of its programming reflects that; its first post-shutdown play was “Ni Mi Madre,” a much-praised autobiographical examination of culture and sexuality by Arturo Luís Soria, whom the theater has now commissioned to write a follow-up.“What I’ve loved about Rattlestick is we’re small and scrappy and authentic and take chances and aren’t burdened by huge institutional issues of massive unaffordable space — we’re like a motorcycle, not a cruise ship,” Topol said. “You don’t get the luxury of the cruise ship — you get the scrappy ride of the motorcycle — but you get the flexibility to be able to twist and turn as things go.”Topol said she feels comfortable leaving in part because the theater now has a fully financed plan to redo its performance space, which it rents harmoniously from St. John’s in the Village, an Episcopal church. The theater space, where it has been located since 1999, has had two serious challenges: The only way to get there is to climb a narrow stairway, which means the theater is not accessible to those who can’t navigate those stairs; and the only way to use the bathroom is to traverse the stage.Rattlestick has now raised the $4 million — about half from the city — to finance a project that will, at its most basic, add an elevator and patron bathrooms, but will also modernize the entrance and the theater itself by relocating the front door, adding a box office and a small lobby, and removing the raised stage so that the performance and seating areas are flexible, as well as accessible. The theater will be able to seat up to 93 people — about the same as it does now. “It’s not ‘bigger is better,’” Topol said. “It feels like we are really right-sized for the work that we are doing.”“I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was,” Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of Rattlestick’s board, said of Topol’s move.Dana Golan for The New York TimesThe renovation will allow Rattlestick to stay in the West Village, which has become a very pricey area, but is the neighborhood where the theater has long been located and is determined to remain. Rattlestick also shares a rehearsal space on Gansevoort Street with three other theater organizations. “It is critical to maintain places for artists in our neighborhoods,” said the renovation’s architect, Marta Sanders.Construction, Topol hopes, will begin next summer, pending city approval, and would last a year; during construction, the theater would present work at other locations. The theater is continuing to raise money for programming and operations.The chairman of the theater’s board, Jeff Thamkittikasem, acknowledged surprise at Topol’s move, but said he had become supportive.“When I first heard about it, I tried to talk her out of it, but my mom is a nurse, and at some point it switched for me and I saw that connection about wanting to care for others in a much more direct, physical way,” he said. “I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was.”Thamkittikasem said the organization is healthy and that the board has retained a search firm to look for Topol’s successor. He added, “Rattlestick is in a very strong place since Daniella took over — we’re stronger financially, we have good connections to foundations and funders, we have an active board and a solid staff, and our reputation has grown.” More

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      Margaret Atwood and Others Confront Grief in ‘The Nurse Antigone’

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      A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Johns Hopkins Hospital, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the author Margaret Atwood.Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”Clockwise from top left, Amy Smith, Charlaine Lasse and Aliki Argiropoulos.Theater of War ProductionsWhile most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand … and on the other.’”The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.Bryan Doerries, center bottom, with, clockwise from top left: Marjolaine Goldsmith, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Nyasha Hatendi and Frankie Faison in a reading Sophocles’ works in 2021.Theater of War ProductionsIn May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King,” starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said. More