Theatre review: Lifeline

At last, the musical about antimicrobial resistance that someone, somewhere has presumably been clamouring for! Alexander Fleming (Alan Vicary,) Phlegm to his friends if Lifeline is to be believed, won a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of Penicillin, but by 1950 was already warning that the overuse of antibiotics could lead to bacteria developing a resistance, leaving patients as helpless as they were before their introduction. In the present day, Scottish-American musician Aaron (Nathan Salstone) survives a radical operation to cure his colon cancer, only to succumb to sepsis in the Edinburgh hospital where his childhood sweetheart Jess (Maz McGinlay) now works as a paediatrician. The will-they/won't-they of whether they'll get back together has to take second place to the question of whether Aaron will survive at all.

Rehearsed reading review:A Brief List of Everyone Who Died

Not all theatres can reopen in person just yet: If the Finborough attempted to do social distancing that'd be one audience member in the theatre and the next one at Earl's Court station, so for the moment they're still going strong with online content. Some brand-new content in the case of Jacob Marx Rice’s tragicomic A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, which gets its world premiere as a Zoom rehearsed reading, directed by Alex Howarth. At the age of 5 Graciella (Vivia Font) has her first experience of death; her parents (Caoimhe Farren and Paco Lozano) try to get her to say goodbye to her pet dog before he's put down, but she's distracted. The next day she's forgotten what they told her, and when she realises she'll never see her dog again she blames them for the loss. It becomes a frequently-recounted anecdote but it also feeds into Marx Rice's recurring question of whether someone's first experience of death in childhood influences the way they deal with it for the rest of their lives.