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Lungs: In Camera review – Claire Foy and Matt Smith mix the personal and planetary

Old Vic, London
In a physically distanced stage production, performed live to a Zoom audience, Duncan Macmillan’s play acquires new pertinence

More than three months after UK theatres were closed by the pandemic, it is both poignant and uplifting to watch actors walk back on stage. Just about keeping a metre apart, Matt Smith and Claire Foy have returned to London’s Old Vic for a handful of physically distanced performances of Lungs, resuming roles they played in 2019. This time, however, the auditorium is empty and the audience on Zoom.

Duncan Macmillan’s nimble play, about a couple anticipating parenthood, suits this streaming experiment directed by Matthew Warchus, the first in the theatre’s In Camera initiative. It’s a two-hander, so there’s no supporting cast to swerve, and the script specifies no costume changes, props or interval. Lungs was written for a bare stage. The effect can be especially immediate and communal: my memories of Paines Plough’s 2014 in-the-round production are indivisible from the presence of other audience members huddled inside the Roundabout venue.

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