Breathing Corpses

Synopsis

Whether you’re a teenage chambermaid or a middle-aged storage unit manager, it’s always hard to forget the smell of a corpse. Especially if it’s your second of the week, or if they keep turning up at work. A multi award-winning playwright and clinical observer of humankind, Laura Wade’s mastery of character and humour has never been more evident than in this brilliantly complex puzzle of life and death. Skipping between dark comedy and fiendish thriller, Breathing Corpses is as enigmatic and arresting as its stone cold protagonists.

Our Review:

2 March 2005

In a series of tensely calibrated, overlapping vignettes around death, despair and domestic violence, Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses makes for relentlessly grim viewing. But as played out in Anna Mackmin’s nerve-jangling and intense production, it is also gruesomely gripping.

Wade - who seems to have suddenly emerged onto the London scene this year with two original plays in the space of the same month after previous regional theatre work and the literary adaptation Young Emma at the Finborough - appears to be marking a territory around the subject of death.

Her other new play, Colder Than Here (premiered at Soho Theatre at the beginning of February), movingly observed the preparations that a dying cancer patient makes with her family for her own passing. But whereas that haunting play was domestic in its insularity and detail, Breathing Corpses encompasses a sense of a much wider world, where one death reverber...

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Latest User Review

62.188.131.50) - 27 February 2005:

I was completely in the dark about this production prior to attending last nights performance. However i was pleasantly surprised as what i witnessed was a very well written taught thriller. The acting was very strong accross the Three different (but yet connected) storylines and the staging was very clever in such a small space. Although Ms Wade's idea is not particularly original, it was extremely well written and executed and i am certain many will find it a thoroughly good night out. I heard several people discussing the "who dunnit" as i left the theatre. And that surely is a good sign, as a theatre lover i'd hate to be given an easy ride....

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