Rsc

Southwark Playhouse is beating the latest lockdown with a zingy new musical about social media. The performers, Francesca Forristal and Jordan Paul Clarke, remember the far-off days when Facebook was just a harmless supplement to ordinary social interactions. How did it turn into a freedom-gobbling corporate monster? We meet the Zuckerbergs, Mark and Priscilla, as they usher a TV crew into their mansion like a pair of politburo bigwigs showing tourists around a glue factory in North Korea. The down-to-earth billionaires offer bland answers to scripted questions. ‘How do you raise children when you can give them anything?’ Mark reveals that the mini-Zuckerbergs are treated like normal kids. ‘But, guys,’

High Tide got there first. The East Anglian theatre company has produced a series of lockdown mini-dramas, Love in the Time of Corona, made up of five filmed reflections on self-isolation. ‘Rainbows’ by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is narrated by a woman on the edge teaching her kids to decorate the windows with coloured paints. ‘Child Two is crying and Child One is giving me the finger.’ Outside, as she takes a photograph, she suffers an anxiety attack. ‘The gurgling panic in the base of my gut, the pain in my chest. Not virus, all fear.’ She decides to flee. But will her children survive without her? Convincingly performed by Katie