The Stage

Breathing Corpses

Published Wednesday 9 March 2005 at 17:00 by Aleks Sierz

All happy people resemble one another, each unhappy person is sad in their own way. Laura Wade’s powerful new play is about unhappiness and about how one death can cause another, and another, and another.

There are three plot lines. Amy works as a hotel cleaner, Jim is married to Elaine and runs a self-storage business, and Ben and Kate’s relationship comes under strain one hot summer day. In each case, the discovery of a body changes the lives of those involved.

But instead of telling the story in a linear way, which would suggest a pedestrian cause and effect, Wade creates a temporal puzzler - jumping back and forward in time - and turns domestic tragedy into a thriller. The clash between the tone of sadness and the tricksiness of the play’s structure gives the evening its undeniable edge.

If the writing in Wade’s Colder Than Here was too polite, here it throws off all restraint and is as dangerous as piranhas and as noisy as barking dogs.

In the best scene, Niamh Cusack’s irritable Elaine confronts Paul Copley’s bemused Jim with the effects of his inability to talk. As in all the best plays, it is communication and not violence that is the underlying theme.

Fiercely staged by Anna Mackmin, Breathing Corpses pits Tamzin Outhwaite’s screaming Kate against James McAvoy’s victimised Ben and features Laura Elphinstone as the gullible Amy. As a writer, Wade is unusual in her concern for the family and if her play is very nasty, it’s also very human.