Dead Air

Corpus Playrooms, 1st-5th February, 9.30pm, £5-6

Directed by Michael Christie

[rating:2/5]

You’ve got to hand it to Christie: the one aspect of his writing that didn’t horribly miss the mark is the remarkably apt title. Dead Air was less a tantalising hint at the action than a physically accurate description of the atmosphere in the theatre. Frigid. With the audience only just outnumbering the cast, it was a tough mood to lighten, even while they did their best.

The script was fast-paced and potentially very funny: two brothers on holiday with their mother discover that the dear old woman selfishly died on a park bench. Since she copped it abroad, this loses them their inheritance (I’m no expert on inheritance law so shan’t query anything there) and this, of course, directs the action to the attempt to smuggle her body back home.

They try a wheelchair, a body bag – with vomit gags and a schizophrenic policeman thrown in… oh and mother’s ghost comes back to let younger son Dennis know how morally degenerate the plan is, oh but then helps them execute it by freezing time so they can make their escape. Confused? I certainly was. More to the point, the cast seemed to be too.

Michael Christie as conniving, bullying elder brother urges a panicking Dennis (Ben O’Malley) to “Act natural!” Regrettably, both Christie and O’Malley took this line as a set of instructions. This is not a play which should take itself too seriously, and neither appeared quite sure what kind of acting they were supposed to be doing.

Not airline-approved hand luggae

Neither the plot nor the pace allowed for naturalistic characterisation, and O’Malley also demonstrated this confusion. Charmingly over-the-top as excited young tourist or carsick passenger, when faced with more harrowing emotional scenes his performance fell apart, leading to his corpsing on several occasions. Only one character in this play is allowed to corpse.

This was as much a fault of the script as the actors:  moments of comic promise needed to be woven together more fluidly than the mostly uncomfortable and unconvincing dialogue allowed. The overall effect was jerky and more amateurish than the talents of either the writer or the actors promised. Two minutes after being traumatised by a ghostly visitation from his dead mother, O’Malley had shaken off all signs of distress to engage in supermarket banter about basic-range body bags- this hardly shows us the sweet, sensitive boy his mother described.

The staging was an imaginative effort at negotiating a restricted space, but, despite the general lack of furniture, scene changes were clunky and unwelcome at those moments where the comedy had lifted the script out of its rut. I was especially disappointed when the dead mother, brilliantly played by Amy Howlett, stood up to assist in a well-lit scene change. Her performance demonstrated the acting which the script demanded, delivering genuine poignancy in her heartfelt goodbye to her sons, and marshalling the ridiculous extravagance of the script to comic advantage. In having her corpse resurrect to shuffle a bench around before what should have been her dramatic return as a ghost, Christie destroyed the potential for a great moment of theatrical tension. You wouldn’t catch Hamlet Senior moving benches.

Dead Air can be an enjoyable watch. Wonderfully gross lines as “Come on Dennis, she’s just a fleshy sack of guts and shite by now,” show sparks of vitality, but it needs more to be brought fully to life. This play is best approached as the script should have been, with no pretences to seriousness – but ultimately this is a work only a mother could love. Do not resuscitate.