Breathing Corpses (Oberon Modern Plays)

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Along the way, we learn yet more of the talented Miss Wade's philosophy of death. Her men are not yet well-rounded and they always seem to be victims but her voice is special. While it may not be heard twice every month going forwards, there can be no doubt that she has a rich future in store. At just 27, Wade has gone from the playwriting equivalent of 0 to 90 in what seems like seconds. She began writing full-time only a year ago. Having two premieres in one month is, she admits, exciting and scary, but at least it relieves her of the burden that faces all first-time playwrights: of following their debut with another corker. In fact, Wade has already delivered her third play, a commission for Soho Theatre. There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen. This is a play of polarity. Reality jostles with fiction as the audience navigates the set, which is formed of “rooms” delimited by cardboard boxes. In the centre there is pile of these boxes, interspersed with television screens that light up in between scenes, giving the audience a context beyond the lives we are prying into. The dialogue itself is scattered with polar oppositions, and the banal sits next to the profound; the lines which will turn out to be crucial to the plot and the play are lost in everyday speech. This banality undercuts the unravelling of the lives of the characters: when workman Ray is told that his boss has inexplicably taken all the doors off the hinges in his house in a moving and pitiful manifestation of post-traumatic stress, Ray asks “Whadya use?” and is satisfied by the response that Jim used the screwdriver lying nearby. The audience however, astonished and bemused by this and injected with dramatic irony, could never be satisfied. Another polarity: the play forces the past and the future to oppose one another, an opposition which works in such a way that any attempt to understand the chronology will ultimately fail.

Where my body stops and the air around it starts has felt a little like this long continuous line of a battleground for about my whole life, I think.

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The last scene is also troublesome. Without giving too much away I will say that, although we are made to empathise with and understand the previous events that take place in the play, this last one comes across as a lazy way to end. A character is introduced supposedly to wrap the whole thing up, but because he is stereotypical and one-dimensional, he ends up doing nothing of the sort. This character stands out like a sore thumb, perhaps because the others are so well-crafted.

The smart people are thriving. The smart people see business opportunity in what’s happening to our planet. We have gathered here to solve the world’s problems, and we all know the solution is Fossil Fuels! [Loud cheers.] The rest of the cast, too, give exceptional performances (which, I repeat, would have better fitted other surroundings, but let’s forget about that plaint for now). Helena Wilson’s Kate mauls boyfriends and household dogs. She is a hysterical and sarcastic woman with a perennially pissed off face. She swears naturally. Her partner, Ben, is played by the director, Dominic Applewhite, and he carries off the violent shifts in register well, by turns meek and murderous. Isobel Jesper Jones jabbers wonderfully as Elaine, marshalling an impressive array of tones and facial expressions – an ideal raconteuse. She is credibly despondent in the darker scenes. James Watson, as Elaine’s husband, Jim, contributes two shrewd portrayals, first of a thin-lipped bureaucrat, then of the same man traumatised. His sense of control is unassailable: he does not waste a wink. Calam Lynch as Ray is simple without being a caricature. Cassian Bilton plays a bumbling charmer, who turns out a psychopath. His look of manic fixation strikes the right note; Hugh Grant with a bloodlust for raw pigs’ entrails. Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling is an intergenerational story about a family in Alice Springs, Australia. Our protagonist, Gabriel York is the grandson of Henry and Elizabeth Law, who we meet in London in 1959. Gabriel York’s father, Gabriel Law, has a strained relationship with his mother as a result of her refusal to shed light on the mysterious disappearance of his father when Gabriel Law was only seven years old. This monologue, which can be found towards the end of the play, sheds light on exactly what happened to make Gabriel Law’s father leave. In this monologue, after throwing a glass on wine in his face, Elizabeth confronts her husband, Henry, about a visit she received earlier that day from two policemen, and the accusations they made against Henry. She explains how she immediately defended him to the policemen, but then as she set about cleaning and painting their house, she makes a horrifying discovery. For most of the monologue, Elizabeth is using the metaphor of cleaning their neglected home to express the realisation she’s made about their neglected relationship and all the things she’s swept under the rug, until now. A powerful dramatic monologue, with a horrifying twist.Oh, yes – it’s the end of days! But who exactly is complaining? The Chinese are investing in cloud seeding. Saudi Arabia is making a fortune out of drought-resistant crop technology. They’re growing food in dustbowls, and they’re making trillions in the process! If this is the apocalypse, I say bring it on! [Cheers] This will hardly be the only review to suggest that hot young playwright Laura Wade seems obsessed with death. Colder Than Here, which opened less than a month ago at Soho, dispassionately followed a dying woman's preparations for eternity. Breathing Corpses is an elusive tale that observes a gruesome cycle of linked deaths. Breathing Corpses is not a play about the living coping with death. It is hardly about the living but rather, as the title suggests, the half-dead: the characters had a close encounter with a cadaver, and their minds are dropsical with thoughts of death. Do they cope? Most people do, but not they. They collapse with singular ease under the weight, wreaking more death on the way. Why do they fail with such gusto? It is not explained — the play is not concerned with naturalistic minutiae. There is barely any character development. There are no motives. The portraits do not swell. The circular plot – the cunning of it – promises an antiseptic game, not a brooding tragedy, more card castle than gothic cathedral. Cleverness, at least the kind the audience would detect too readily, does not sit well with drama so intellectually, again, the play is a vacuum. No deep thoughts here. At no point does Laura Wade, the author, commit herself to ideas or convictions. She fights shy of didacticism. Faced with death, she seems to tell us, there is nothing to say. It is ‘surreal’, as one character puts it. Well, we’re not afraid of you! [cheers] To this home-grown enemy, to the faceless and so-called ‘cultural’ terrorists, this “Front”, these Turquoise militants, I say…up yours!! Everything’s dying, apparently. The weather – the planet as we know it. Apparently even Capitalism itself is dying! [Laughter.] Please! You wish! [Applause.]

Abby Clarke’s set is full of cardboard boxes, in heaps on the floor and hanging like cocoons from the ceiling. They, apparently symbols for death, exactly capture the ubiquity of death in Breathing Corpses. Finally, I felt that a significant improvement would be to cut the last scene. The first production to do without this remarkably shallow ending would be one step closer to triumph. Or, even better, Applewhite might wish to bring the cast together again for a different play – some Tennessee Williams, perhaps. His current production abounds in hints of true greatness which might have been achieved in a more favourable setting, one replete with danger, dynamism, and tears. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ With Breathing Corpses Wade wanted to explore the effect of discovering a body on the people who discovered it. The premise of the play is both intriguing and dangerous. She always has you on your toes trying to figure out how these characters are connected, because they are, and who is under the sheets in that bed as we file into the tiny theatre. There are clues in the text as to who it is. Kim Nelson plays Kate and Benjamin Sutherland plays her boyfriend Ben. Their lovemaking is rough and he has the bruises to prove it. She is tough, in control and goes too far. He is boyish and a bit aggressive and turns dangerous when he thinks she might have been mean to his dog. Finally Johnathan Sousa plays Charlie, a smooth-talking, charming guest in the hotel. He chats up Amy. Is he harmless? Is Amy? Director David Ferry always has us guessing.

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The limelight is not where Wade wants to be – she uses actors to occupy that particular space – but at the recent Critics’ Circle Award ceremony she was forced to hold the attention of an audience as she collected her award for Most Promising Playwright. “I was really nervous on the day,” Wade admits, “because I’m not an enormous fan of speaking.” The ‘in public’ aspect of this particular sentence is hastily added as an after-thought.