Timeliness of both solo shows? Yes. Accidental but considerable - and a bit strange.
I had wanted to write a performance about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ever since I reread her letters with a view to supervising a dissertation. The student changed the subject of that dissertation but deserves a big thank you for making me aware that Lady Mary deserves a film. In the meantime, I wrote her a monologue and, throughout 2019, the year before Covid-19 struck the UK, I was touring it - and her story of pioneering inoculation against smallpox from Turkey more than 70 years before Jenner trialled vaccination. There are so many resonances.
And another thank you to my friend, Vanessa Campion, who, on 1st August 2019 (half a year before anyone had thought of lockdown) came to Lady in the Veil at the Doctor Johnson House in London. She asked if I would fancy doing a solo show about an anchoress as St Mary's church, Faversham had had three - as well as an anchorite who was a retired priest. Fascinated, I started thinking about The Walled Up Woman. I supposed that there might have been three or four more medieval women throughout England choosing to live in religious lockdown on the sides of churches. However, my research which began with Mary Rotha Clay's book The Hermits and Anchorites of England (1910), which is still considered the seminal work, suggests that, in the course of the Middle Ages, there were hundreds.