Jo Clifford on seeking to bring some theatrical healing with The Covid Requiem

Beneath the apparent optimism of the country’s reinvigorated shopping streets and revitalised nightlife, there is a sense that, in our eagerness to move on, we are failing to properly come to terms with the magnitude of what has befallen us during the pandemic. Such a state of affairs might be said to have created a spiritual vacuum, an emotional void where contemplation, communication and comfort should be.

Certainly, that would seem to be the premise of The Covid Requiem, a new performance piece written and performed for Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT, below) by the acclaimed dramatist Jo Clifford with Lesley Orr, who is a historian, theologian and activist for gender and social justice.

The work, which is directed by Amy Liptrott, with live music by Duncan Chisholm and Innes Watson, will be performed in promenade in the beautiful gardens of the Perthshire playhouse. Clifford is full of praise, not only for the talented team who are creating the Requiem, but also for the support of PFT’s artistic director Elizabeth Newman, who commissioned it.

The piece, in which audience members will be invited to remember the many people whose lives have been cut short by the coronavirus, aims, in the words of its creators, “to celebrate the stories and lives of those lost in the pandemic”.

For Clifford, it is a particular cruelty of Covid that so many of its victims have died alone. She notes, too, the “very restricted, very difficult circumstances” in which people have had to bury and cremate their loved ones.

“This is all absolutely correct and as it should be, to control the disease,” she acknowledges. However, the dramatist adds, it has been a terrible aspect of the pandemic that so many people have died without anyone to comfort them.

All of which set Clifford’s mind on a train of thought that culminated in the idea of The Covid Requiem. It is a piece, she tells me, that is rooted in her own life experience. “It goes right back to my childhood,” the writer explains.

“When I was 12, my Mum died very suddenly, when I was away in boarding school.

“I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral, because they thought it would upset me. I felt that very, very deeply.”

That bereavement shaped the way in which Clifford and her family dealt with the terminal illness of the writer’s partner. “Susie got horribly ill with a brain tumour,” the writer explains.

“It was incredibly important for us to be with her, and to stay with her, so that she didn’t die alone. I felt that all the more intensely because, when I’d been working as a nurse, a long time ago, I’d been in situations where people had died alone.

“One man in particular, I remember… I was aware that he was seriously ill, and I was trying to communicate this to people, but I didn’t get through. A doctor never saw him, and he died alone.”

Clifford still feels “pretty rotten” about the death of that man, even though it happened some 46 years ago, in 1975. She feels very strongly that human beings need both compassion in death and space in which to grieve.

The dramatist, who has written more than 100 theatre texts, including the play The Tree Of Knowledge and the celebrated opera Inés de Castro, is a great believer in the power of ritual. Her most successful and famous work of recent years is her piece titled The Gospel According To Jesus Queen Of Heaven, in which Clifford herself performs the title role of a transgender redeemer who promotes understanding, forgiveness and tolerance.

The latter is a remarkable piece of ritualistic theatre. It has found a global resonance, playing to considerable acclaim in Brazil.

The play was going to be staged in Australia, before the pandemic put the performances in abeyance. Currently, Clifford tells me, work is continuing apace on a forthcoming French adaptation of the show.

I suggest to the writer that The Covid Requiem is, in many ways, a logical continuation of the artistic process that created Jesus Queen Of Heaven. Clifford agrees, saying: “it seems to me that theatre makes it possible, gives us the skills, to be able to create the kind of ceremonies that might help, in some way, to heal us and to bring comfort”.

“Our culture is not particularly good at helping us when we’re suffering from grief,” she continues. That includes theatre, she adds.

“So often theatre treats death as if it’s the resolution, and it’s not.” That’s why, Clifford believes, “it’s important to keep trying to find [artistic] forms” that strive to deal with death, bereavement and grief in ways that are humane and constructive.

THE Covid Requiem is, she insists, “not a play, it can’t be a play. It’s a ceremony.”

The writer is, she says, “very lucky” to be collaborating with Orr, who is “a remarkable person”. Orr has, Clifford says, “a strong Church of Scotland background”, and, consequently, “has her roots in ritual”.

Not only that, Clifford adds, but her co-writer, “has worked for many years with people suffering from great trauma, distress and suffering”.

In addition to the script by Clifford and Orr, the Requiem will also boast original, live music. The piece is blessed, Clifford comments, to have the services of such “amazing musicians” as acclaimed Scottish traditional music practitioners Chisholm and Watson.

Standing, as they do, in the best traditions of Scottish music, the pair are sure to make a deeply emotive contribution.

Clifford believes that our society has suffered a “collective trauma” during the pandemic. She hopes that The Covid Requiem will have a further life, beyond its performances in Pitlochry.

“It’s not a depressing piece,” she emphasises. “It’s a piece that’s designed to bring comfort.”

The Covid Requiem is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, September 15-18: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com