E-mail to a friend Find tickets

Breathing Corpses

Published Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 14:35 by Jeremy Brien

This dark work is a return to student roots in Bristol for Laura Wade, a promising young playwright who has already won three awards for the 2005 Royal Court production of the same play, including a share of the prestigious George Devine Award. Plain Clothes Theatre Productions have been Bristol-based for the last two years too, after something of a peripatetic life in London and Canada, and this is a bold, contemporary choice for their second contribution to pub theatre in the city.

Wade’s play is a mini-variation on Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, but with death rather than sex as the catalyst. Three separate discoveries of corpses in varying states of decay appear random events at first, but are cleverly linked by five scenes of varying impact. The middle two, in which Wade explores elements of sado-masochism and then mental breakdown caused by sexual stimulation from a dead body, demonstrate just how skilled she is at building tension and exploring unusual relationships. However, the other three episodes, despite some welcome touches of humour, are disappointingly underwritten and altogether too thin in content.

Ashley Callum and Charlotte Ellis create moments of drama right at the end, as a smooth-talking hotel guest and his chambermaid victim, but the best acting comes from Georgina Carey and Tom Turner as the couple who cannot escape their brutal behaviour towards each other, and David Angus as the businessman in anguish at his reaction to the reality of death.

E-mail to a friend Find tickets