The Ballad of Corona V: Covid-19 personified in a gripping stage play

Six of us are scattered a couple of metres apart from one another around a room in a former mirror factory in Islington when a tall, thin man walks in dressed as a cowboy and starts to speak.

Delivered at breakneck speed, his monologue is a collage made up mostly of snippets of news from the months running up to the spring of this year.

This is the prologue to The Ballad of Corona V, a play by David Watson that had its press night two days before London went into a second national lockdown this week. A sequence of five distinct but related vignettes, it is performed five times each evening, with the audience moving in groups of six from one scene to another.

The actors are socially distanced and none can appear in more than one scene. The cowboy (Stephan Wolf-Schoenburg) is one of two actors playing the Virus and he leads our group along a dark passage to a room where a man and two women dressed in period costume are standing far apart around a festive table.

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It is New Year's Eve 2019 and as they talk and joke about what they are looking forward to in 2020, one of the women says everything is going well apart from a slight irritation at the back of her throat. Then she goes into labour and gives birth to a baby. It is Boris Johnson.

When we go upstairs for the next scene, we are each directed to a chair with a shopping basket full of toilet rolls next to it. A man in white overalls is reclining in a shopping trolley and on a rocking horse in front of us sits another cowboy, this time played by Taurean Steele.

Deception

In a dazzling tour de force, Steele portrays the Virus as a charming, playful, wicked and erudite seducer who wheedles his way into the lives of his victims. He impersonates an old woman to encourage her granddaughter to visit her so that the virus can pass to her mother, a nurse.

Other scenes include an encounter between a young drug dealer (Jermaine Freeman) and a well-meaning, patronising advertising executive (Eleanor Wyld) who has just been furloughed and an episode in the intensive care ward in St Thomas's Hospital where Johnson is being treated for coronavirus and the nurse we saw earlier becomes violently ill. One of Johnson's admirers praises his powers of deception and reels off conspiracy theories about the virus and its origin.

In the final scene, a young poet (Chadrack Mbuini) whose mother is shielding from the virus tries to comfort a friend (Safina Simpson) whose chance of a job has been wrecked by the epidemic without giving her the hug she feels she needs. The play is about to end in tragedy when the Virus intervenes to propose a more optimistic outcome.

The Ballad of Corona V, which will resume its run when the lockdown ends, is the latest production from The Big House, a charity founded by the play's director Maggie Norris to work with young people who have been in the care system. Almost all the actors are "care leavers" and the play is the culmination of a 12-week programme that includes lessons in cooking, budgeting and other life skills.

Norris founded the charity after she visited a women’s prison to do research for a play and she concluded that many of the inmates did not belong behind bars but had found themselves there because of personal misfortune. About one in four of Britain’s prison population has been through the care system and half of the inmates under 25.

Discipline

The Big House receives no public funding and depends on philanthropy from trusts, foundations and individuals, including a local builder who has provided tens of thousands of pounds worth of work on the building in Islington for free.

Norris says that one of the most valuable elements of the Big House programme is the discipline it introduces to the participants’ lives and the high professional standards she demands in their theatre productions.

Many alumni of the Big House have gone on to successful careers as performers, including Jasmine Jobson, once described by social workers as "the most difficult child in Westminster", who was nominated for a Bafta this year for her role in the Netflix series Top Boys.

The Ballad of Corona V is informed by the often turbulent and harsh life experience of its actors as well as the wit and lyricism of a script that captures the strange spirit of the times.

“Well that’s about the best I can do. What happens now I’m not the one to say. I’m not the one who got you into this mess, I only took advantage of the mess already there,” the Virus says at the end.

“Time to go home, it’s almost New Year. Don’t stray too close to one another. Or too far.”