This time last year, the Perthshire hills were alive with the sounds and songs of A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens’ ultimate festive fable of how bad times can be turned to good was Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2019 Christmas show. This year’s enforced closure of all theatres and places of entertainment due to safety measures enforced due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, has sadly left such institutions empty. That hasn’t prevented creativity. The last nine months has seen a welter of online performances designed to provide a lifeline for audiences and artists alike. These have ranged from the National Theatre of Scotland’s thrice weekly Scenes for Survival series of 55 bite size works created in lockdown, to Rapture Theatre’s similarly styled Rapture Mini Bites being made available each Friday. Pitlochry Festival Theatre itself has seen some two and a half million viewers engaging with its online Shades of Tay initiative, which has seen more than twenty premieres of new work for
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.