Sometimes, truly, it is just two men shouting at each other for a bit.īut as a cultural artefact, Staged is going to be fascinating for many years to come: no other artform has come close to documenting those strange, gloopy, endless minutes you spend on a Zoom call with someone you can’t currently see, exhausted of all conversation, both just sitting there, sighing.

Staged almost has the same appeal as Curb Your Enthusiasm, in that regard: renowned actors playing vile caricatures of themselves and having an awful lot of fun doing so, but … are they having more fun than we are watching them do it? Your mileage may vary.

It has the same playfulness as a bloopers reel and the same knowing wink of people who cite Aristotle while drinking red wine in pubs, and somewhere in between that – in between all these layered versions of Sheen and Tennant – is something close to the truth, which, of course, we never see. What Staged offers is another illusion: an illusion of reality. We like seeing actors not being actors – with their terrible, un-styled outfits and their grown-out hair and their perfect skin and houses – and we love to see them break face, see the cracks between reality and illusion (this is why we never tire of watching an actor on a chatshow talking in their native accent).

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