IT SEEMS strange to realise that live theatre, with its shared audience experience, is so long ago. But two plays early in the year uncannily chimed with the present.

In February, Juliet Gilkes’s new play The Whip at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford seemed to presage the Black Lives Matter movement.

Uncovering the inevitable political shenanigans behind the 18th-century abolition of the slave trade — fought as passionately as the Brexit conflict — it followed the parliamentary battles over compensation demanded by the slave owners for freeing the 80,000 slaves in Britain’s West Indian colonies. It incurred a debt to the nation only cleared five years ago.