BREATHING CORPSES. To 19 March.

London

BREATHING CORPSES
by Laura Wade

Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) To 19 March 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 4pm
BSL Signed 10 March
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7565 5000 (24 hours)
020 7565 5100 (10am-6pm)
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 March

Young playwright with different dramatic styles in matters of life and death.After the warm glow of Laura Wade's Soho Theatre play Colder Than Here comes the cold bath of her Royal Court Breathing Corpses. Colder's linear story of a family facing death is contrasted by the fragmentary parallel and separate lives of an action involving a hotel cleaner, a self-storage company and a couple with a painful love-relationship.

The structure's intricate, and in Anna Mackmin's superbly acted production, reveals moments of intense, often anxious emotion. Especially self-storage merchant Jim. For all the lightness Niamh Cusack's Elaine tries bringing into his life he ends up seeking relief from the tightness within him by removing all the doors. In one of Mackmin's loud, sudden-impact scene openings the doors are revealed at crazy angles, as if caught mid-simultaneous flight.

That's redolent of these characters' lives, presented in a rondo-like pattern, bookended by Amy, Laura Elphinstone's nervously talkative chambermaid, who both discovers and invites death in her scenes, becoming fascinated with the knife she finds in a guest's luggage.

She may, or not in this teasingly allusive cross-referencing, become the body discovered in a park by Kate, the punchy businesswoman suffering the heat (contrast the heavy rain of the preceding dark scene with Jim), and lashing out with arm and foot alike at partner and pet in the fast and noisy central scene. Possibly too, Jim has become the body already found by Amy in the course of a day's work.

There's always the risk with such upfront contrivings that the self-conscious design works against the reality of the play's substance. Wade doesn't entirely escape this. Yet it's interesting to see a writer try out such different styles as Breathing Corpses and Colder Than Here. And intriguing to find a common thread with the idea of a woman's body in a cardboard box (the dying mother in Colder orders a cardboard coffin which the family paints).

How this will pan out in a growing oeuvre of life (and death)'s rich patterns remains to be viewed. Meanwhile there is a joy in structure, variety and character which make this well worth catching Upstairs at the Court.

Amy: Laura Elphinstone
Jim: Paul Copley
Elaine: Niamh Cusack
Ray: Ryan Pope
Kate: Tamzin Outhwaite
Ben: James McAvoy
Charlie: Rupert Evans

Director: Anna Mackmin
Designer: Paul Wills
Lighting: Mark Jonathan
Sound: Ian Dickinson
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg
Fight director: Terry King

2005-03-09 12:00:09