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Living Record festival review – milk cults, coma patients and homeless ghosts

What if online theatre weren’t a stopgap before the return of the real thing, but an art form in itself? The longer the Covid-19 pandemic has been with us, the more seriously artists have had to consider that question. And here, in the Living Record festival, comes a whole month’s worth of shows by up-and-coming creators who have put digital media first.

With over 40 shows on the bill, the results are variable. Even in the best pieces, you get a sense of artists learning what’s possible as they go. But in its oddball variety – everything from works-in-progress monologues to audio dramas for children – there’s that heady feeling of discovery only a festival can create. There’s even a festival bar.

Festivals are also good for taking the temperature of the times and, if my sample of a dozen of these shows is anything to go by, the past year has left us morose and introspective. The only one I’ve come across that acknowledges the new normal is Breaking Up With Reality, an audio piece by Eden Harbud of Nod at the Fox, which is about the psychological impact of isolation. But it is not alone in its inward focus. Right now, perhaps, the big picture is too troubling to contemplate.

Perhaps for the same reason, death looms large. In David Fox’s Finney’s Ghost, a montage of photographs accompanies Eleanor Barr’s description of a young woman’s relationship with a homeless man who has died on the streets. The piece is a couple of years old, but its reflections of an atomised society and its images of an urban environment that we see with fresh eyes seem very much of today.

Even more dark and introspective is Dance of a Million Pieces, a stream of consciousness poem of panic and loss by Gemma Rogers and Cary Crankson, evoking the inner life of a coma patient. With a hallucinatory parade of images – a hospital, a drill, a dawn landscape – to match Rafael Diogo’s alarming binaural soundtrack, it is edgy and uncomfortable and, however elliptical, keeps you intrigued.

The death of the planet is the theme in Nevergreen, a tribute to the pioneering US ecologist Rachel Carson, written by Gus Mitchell and performed with delicacy by Katurah Morrish. It won’t tell you more than you know already, but it is beautifully filmed by Callum Hale-Thomson and Josh McClure as it captures the contrasting poetry of the natural and man-made worlds.

Death is on the horizon in rather less serious terms in Ram of God, a deliciously daft film by Theodora van der Beek, in which the acolytes of a “milk-based religion” ready themselves for the apocalypse in 2028. Lured to a sunny English garden by an androgynous cult leader, the women perform their rituals, prayers and exercises in what, with its jump cuts and trick photography, looks like a surrealist version of The Wicker Man.

Things take a darker turn as the cult leader uses the “parable of the ungrateful sheep” as a pretext for sexual abuse. If you only see one Living Record show, this should be it.

Also recommended are two audio projects. Not for the squeamish, A Bloody Shambles by Ella Doman-Gajic is an impassioned broadside against period poverty. Meanwhile, for younger listeners, This Noisy Isle by Spun Glass Theatre is an entertaining series of monologues, games and stories that introduce characters and themes from The Tempest.