Jab – Park Theatre, London

Writer: James McDermott

Director: Scott Le Crass

Recent weeks have seen the fifth anniversary of the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown. Those events now collectively exist in the liminal space between immediate memory and the move into becoming history. Which end of that scale they belong to varies, of course, depending on how deeply and personally affected we each were by the pandemic.

In James McDermott’s Jab, those events are relayed through the lives of Anne and Don, a Northern couple of empty-nesters; married for 29 years, their adult sons have moved away and they are left alone, with their love for each other tempered by ongoing niggles. Don (Liam Tobin) is something of a lackadaisical figure, forever promising to redecorate but preferring instead to spend his days in his “vintage shop”, a man cave-turned-vanity project that is fully funded by Anne’s career as an NHS administrator.

The fact that Kacey Ainsworth’s Anne is the house’s breadwinner comes up early and not subtly, becoming a thread throughout. In its early scenes, though, Jab is a playful look at how households tried to adapt. With no children in the house to worry about schoolwork, homework and exercise, for Anne the biggest shift is struggling with online meetings while Don continues as normal, not caring about much and watching telly.

But as many families discovered, being cooped up together is not always a picnic. The tensions around money, and the increasing concern about the state of the world and Anne’s NHS job, start to expose cracks. Director Scott Le Crass helps McDermott’s script bounce between the couple’s bickering – sometimes playful, occasionally much more biting – and their joyous moments, dancing around their living room to the Annie Lennox tracks that marked their courtship.

McDermott deals primarily in short scenes, often ending with the latest cumulative numbers of Covid-related deaths. And so the months pass, and as Anne begins to experience menopause on top of everything else she’s dealing with, matters reach a boiling point. Ainsworth really comes into her own, balancing the fun side of her character with one that is beginning to fear for her safety. Don’s libido begins to ramp up like a caged animal, while hers is dissipating completely. Figures about domestic violence increases during lockdown paint a mixed picture, but like Anne, it’s possible that many women felt unable to leave high-risk environments due to the lockdown rules that were in place.

As the play continues into the period where mRNA vaccines became available, the script turns to disagreements about their efficacy. Anne, a staunch defender (and, being an NHS employee, someone also called in to administer vaccines to the public), has to deal with a husband who becomes increasingly hostile to the notion. McDermott has, for script reasons, already established that Don cannot use computers and is not online; his increasing radicalisation on the topic, therefore, becomes attributed only to his readership of the Daily Mail, which reduces the impact of all the anti-vaccination messaging that was happening outside traditional media routes.

Throughout, Tobin gives a compelling portrait of the sort of man Anne would have settled for over three decades: affectionate when he needs to be, but ultimately selfish. But as they both contract Covid – she, vaccinated, recovers quickly, while he gets worse but won’t even see a doctor – this becomes more of a solo project for Ainsworth.

This is where McDermott’s writing, previously pin-sharp and engaging, begins to struggle. Ainsworth is left with just a mobile phone as a scene partner, robbing both the actor and the play of the spark that fuels her otherwise electric performance. Despite all the hardship he puts her through, we still get the sense that Anne loves Don, but the play’s ending peters out rather than finishes.

In the intervening years, many of us have tended to gloss over the nearly two years of lockdowns, restarts, further lockdowns, vaccinations and stop-start returns to normality. It’s easier to do that when one hasn’t lost loved ones to the virus. Jab is a reminder that none of us should forget. The numbers of those who died, and of those who have retained life-altering after-effects, are enormous. But within individual households they were, and are still, devastating.

Continues until 26 April 2025