ast week, Jade Anouka announced on Twitter: “Gonna shoot my own short film!” She had been contacted by a theatre company for an acting role, but such are our extraordinary times of social distancing, she was asked to shoot her own footage as well for the nine-minute monologue written by Aisha Zia and directed by Suba Das. “It was down to me to work out the shots. I got some pointers from Suba and recorded it on my iPhone,” says the London-born actor, poet and playwright. She soundproofed her London flat as best as she could and shot snippets of everyday life from “the view out of the window to my dog sleeping or barking”. The film, Bedlam Before the Burnout, is the first in HighTide’s five-part series Love in the Time of Corona, which will be streamed weekly. The other monologues are written by Olivier-nominated Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Bafta nominee Dawn King, grime poet Debris Stevenson and Ben Weatherill, who wrote the acclaimed play Jellyfish. Theatre-making, it seems, has never been so DIY. The series comes amid a welter of new online offerings. Anouka loves the speed and invention of it all and the industry’s quickfire response, but misses the collective experience of live theatre. “It is devastating and sad,” she says. “Individuals are dealing with job losses as well as the thought of what this might lead to. Theatre is struggling, but it is such a creative world that I’m not surprised we have come up with ways of keeping performance alive. We know it’s not the same thing as live theatre – I can’t wait to get back to that – but you have to keep creating in the meantime.” Her own creative responses have included recording a speech from The Merchant of Venice as a rousing reminder of the value of Shakespeare in troubled times. “I woke up one morning and had the idea that it needed to be out there.” Anouka, who has worked on Shakespeare productions at the Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female trilogy at the Donmar, emailed fellow actors to ask for recorded contributions. The response was astonishing: Judi Dench replied within hours with a recording – “I could tell she wasn’t reading the speech but knew all the words” – and she heard from Harriet Walter, Meera Syal, Paterson Joseph and Paapa Essiedu. The result is a moving rendition of the “the quality of mercy” speech made by Portia. Anouka picked it partly out of sentimental reasons, because it was the first Shakespeare play she performed in professionally (“It was the RSC’s production, and I was something like fifth spear carrier”) and for its message about kindness: “It’s just beautiful for its poetry, but there is a reminder in it to be kind to each other.” The HighTide monologue is also a response to a global state of solitude. Anouka plays a woman whose life is brought to a halt by the lockdown and finds herself alone in her house. It leads to deeper reflection on an over-busy life that has left her almost at breaking point and pushes her to make positive re-evaluations. Anouka is in isolation with her partner and three-year-old rescue dog (a photogenic terrier mix who features in her Instagram feed). “I don’t feel as positive,” she admits. “There is too much darkness, although I’m someone who works from home anyway so I think I’ve adapted easier. It must be hard for people doing regular jobs who are now suddenly in their house with family or partners.” When the lockdown began, Anouka was in the middle of two film projects – including a thriller for Channel 5 called The Drowning, starring alongside Jill Halfpenny – which are now postponed. She has writing projects on the go, too. Anouka has long written poetry and in 2016 published a collection, Eggs on Toast, but she is newer to scriptwriting. She has just handed in the draft of a play to Soho theatre with the working title Mother Daughter, and is commissioned to write another for Paines Plough. But before that, her one-woman play, Heart, is scheduled to debut at the Kiln this summer. Directed by Nancy Medina, Anouka will also perform as its lead. She describes it as a story being told by a black woman but with no mention of blackness. In the trailer for the show, she says: “This is not a black story or a woman’s story, but for all those who have felt ‘other’,” though she adds now that “as soon as I stand on a stage as a black woman, people will bring their assumptions”. There are dynamic stories around diversity being told in theatre at the moment, but she feels that only certain kinds get plucked for bigger stages. “The shows that are produced by the mainstream are not representative of the stories that are being told. They seem diluted.” The focus, she adds, is often black experience imported from America. Writers such as Clint Dyer have spoken about the dearth of black British stories on stage, and Anouka feels the same. “Watching a play about black Americans, it’s easy for an audience to feel separate and for the characters on stage to be othered. We really need black British stories.” Bedlam Before the Burnout is available on HighTide’s YouTube channel. Heart is due to be staged at the Kiln, London, later this year.