The Stage

This is Tales of the Afterlives

Published Monday 24 May 2010 at 11:12 by Harry Venning

This is Tales of the Afterlives speculates upon the nature of death and eternity, and there were moments in the performance when I was so bored than I thought I was experiencing them both first hand.

On the page David Eagleman’s cult book Sum - Forty Tales From the Afterlives is a pithy, witty, imaginative and challenging collection of vignettes. If only it had stayed on the page.

Mercifully, the 40 tales have been reduced to just 14 for this live adaptation, and that’s still about 12 too many.

The show begins with the readers, one of whom is the author, coming through a door at the back of the stage and finding their allotted desks. Here they sit in darkness, patiently awaiting the spotlight to pick them out and signal their turn to speak for four or five minutes. They read from scripts, a practice I personally find totally unacceptable in a theatre piece. Meanwhile, behind them on a large screen, three faces continually undergo metamorphosis at an agonisingly slow rate. And that is about as visually exciting as the evening gets.

The stories are accompanied by Brian Eno’s plinky-plonk synthesiser score which is, at best, intrusive and at worst, infuriatingly repetitive.

The readings are not without charm, and there are several funny moments, but they lack any sense of urgency or drama. The format makes it impossible for the evening to develop or change direction, and the experience is ultimately akin to sitting through a school essay reading competition.