Breathing Corpses (Oberon Modern Plays)

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Comment. Breathing Corpses was written by Laura Wade, a British playwright. She began being produced in 1996. She wrote Breathing Corpses in 2005, about the middle of her career and many years before her explosive play, Posh, opened in London in 2010. The Story. Breathing Corpses has opened the Coal Mine’s third season. It’s a play full of mystery. One of the many mysteries here is that the characters are breathing and alive, but over the course of the play, some of them will not be. Well, if you ask me, everyone’s feeling fine. If you ask me, everyone’s feeling better. (Pause.) . . . Everyone’s much calmer, don’t you think? … Men are so wedded to their gadgets . . . It belittles them … It takes away all their authority . . . A man needs to keep his hands free . . . if you ask me. Even an attaché case is enough to put me off. There was a man, once, I found really attractive, then I saw him with a square shoulder-bag, a man’s shoulder-bag, but that was it. There’s nothing worse than a shoulder bag. Although there’s also nothing worse than a cell phone. A man ought to give the impression that he’s alone . . . if you ask me. I mean, that he’s capable of being alone …! I also have a John Wayne-ish idea of virility. And what was it he had? A Colt .45. A device for creating a vacuum . . . A man who can’t give the impression that he’s a loner has no texture … So, Michael, are you happy? Is it somewhat fractured, our little … What was it you said? … I’ve forgotten the word, . . . but in the end . . . everyone’s feeling more or less all right . . . if you ask me. Petroleum and coal are the energy sources our planet needs to see it through this time of flux! The timing is urgent. At just 27, Wade has gone from the playwriting equivalent of 0 to 90 in what seems like seconds. She began writing full-time only a year ago. Having two premieres in one month is, she admits, exciting and scary, but at least it relieves her of the burden that faces all first-time playwrights: of following their debut with another corker. In fact, Wade has already delivered her third play, a commission for Soho Theatre.

Oh, yes – it’s the end of days! But who exactly is complaining? The Chinese are investing in cloud seeding. Saudi Arabia is making a fortune out of drought-resistant crop technology. They’re growing food in dustbowls, and they’re making trillions in the process! If this is the apocalypse, I say bring it on! [Cheers] The scene with Kate and her boyfriend, Ben, was excellently portrayed. It was easy to relate to the dialogue and her anger with her boyfriend’s seemingly endless passivity. It transpires that Kate, too, has found a body, but, rather than it traumatising her, it merely annoys her that she has to devote so much time to helping the police. The dialogue is particularly excellent in this scene. Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling is an intergenerational story about a family in Alice Springs, Australia. Our protagonist, Gabriel York is the grandson of Henry and Elizabeth Law, who we meet in London in 1959. Gabriel York’s father, Gabriel Law, has a strained relationship with his mother as a result of her refusal to shed light on the mysterious disappearance of his father when Gabriel Law was only seven years old. This monologue, which can be found towards the end of the play, sheds light on exactly what happened to make Gabriel Law’s father leave. In this monologue, after throwing a glass on wine in his face, Elizabeth confronts her husband, Henry, about a visit she received earlier that day from two policemen, and the accusations they made against Henry. She explains how she immediately defended him to the policemen, but then as she set about cleaning and painting their house, she makes a horrifying discovery. For most of the monologue, Elizabeth is using the metaphor of cleaning their neglected home to express the realisation she’s made about their neglected relationship and all the things she’s swept under the rug, until now. A powerful dramatic monologue, with a horrifying twist.

Past productions

Breathing Corpses is not a play about the living coping with death. It is hardly about the living but rather, as the title suggests, the half-dead: the characters had a close encounter with a cadaver, and their minds are dropsical with thoughts of death. Do they cope? Most people do, but not they. They collapse with singular ease under the weight, wreaking more death on the way. Why do they fail with such gusto? It is not explained — the play is not concerned with naturalistic minutiae. There is barely any character development. There are no motives. The portraits do not swell. The circular plot – the cunning of it – promises an antiseptic game, not a brooding tragedy, more card castle than gothic cathedral. Cleverness, at least the kind the audience would detect too readily, does not sit well with drama so intellectually, again, the play is a vacuum. No deep thoughts here. At no point does Laura Wade, the author, commit herself to ideas or convictions. She fights shy of didacticism. Faced with death, she seems to tell us, there is nothing to say. It is ‘surreal’, as one character puts it.

The limelight is not where Wade wants to be – she uses actors to occupy that particular space – but at the recent Critics’ Circle Award ceremony she was forced to hold the attention of an audience as she collected her award for Most Promising Playwright. “I was really nervous on the day,” Wade admits, “because I’m not an enormous fan of speaking.” The ‘in public’ aspect of this particular sentence is hastily added as an after-thought.

But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."

I don’t care about the business, if you don’t want it anymore, fine, we’ll sell it I don’t care. But you’ll have to do something else. You can’t just stay at home taking the place apart with a screwdriver. Gather round, ladies! Here are some powerful and passionate monologues for women in the latter half of their lives (arguably, the best half!) These monologues are all from theatre, if you’re after a film monologue, you can head here, or a monologue from TV, head here. Enjoy!

Where my body stops and the air around it starts has felt a little like this long continuous line of a battleground for about my whole life, I think. I mean I feel like. I feel like you’re letting this get in the way when it really- It’s a bit. I’m a bit- the doors and the talking rubbish about fish in your eyes and- I’m sorry it happened but I won’t take responsibility and you shouldn’t because we had nothing to do with it and we’re not people that kill people and we’re not-

There are five scenes in the play and through subtle, intricate writing some of the characters discover bodies and are haunted by it; some become the bodies themselves and perhaps in one case might be responsible for a body or two. The stories seem separate, but they are not. The beauty of Breathing Corpses is trying to solve the various mysteries as to who is under the covers and dead and who is not. This is a play of polarity. Reality jostles with fiction as the audience navigates the set, which is formed of “rooms” delimited by cardboard boxes. In the centre there is pile of these boxes, interspersed with television screens that light up in between scenes, giving the audience a context beyond the lives we are prying into. The dialogue itself is scattered with polar oppositions, and the banal sits next to the profound; the lines which will turn out to be crucial to the plot and the play are lost in everyday speech. This banality undercuts the unravelling of the lives of the characters: when workman Ray is told that his boss has inexplicably taken all the doors off the hinges in his house in a moving and pitiful manifestation of post-traumatic stress, Ray asks “Whadya use?” and is satisfied by the response that Jim used the screwdriver lying nearby. The audience however, astonished and bemused by this and injected with dramatic irony, could never be satisfied. Another polarity: the play forces the past and the future to oppose one another, an opposition which works in such a way that any attempt to understand the chronology will ultimately fail. All this will be fitted in around actually seeing work performed, as Wade has not lost sight of why she started writing in the first place and why she moved east from Bristol to London: “There’s so much to see”, she says. “I go [to the theatre] three times a week and it is impossible to see everything, which is brilliant! If I don’t go at all during a week I feel rubbish. I don’t mean I feel guilty, I just feel funny in myself.”Abby Clarke’s set is full of cardboard boxes, in heaps on the floor and hanging like cocoons from the ceiling. They, apparently symbols for death, exactly capture the ubiquity of death in Breathing Corpses. Finally, I felt that a significant improvement would be to cut the last scene. The first production to do without this remarkably shallow ending would be one step closer to triumph. Or, even better, Applewhite might wish to bring the cast together again for a different play – some Tennessee Williams, perhaps. His current production abounds in hints of true greatness which might have been achieved in a more favourable setting, one replete with danger, dynamism, and tears. This will hardly be the only review to suggest that hot young playwright Laura Wade seems obsessed with death. Colder Than Here, which opened less than a month ago at Soho, dispassionately followed a dying woman's preparations for eternity. Breathing Corpses is an elusive tale that observes a gruesome cycle of linked deaths. There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen. Last year was probably one of the finest in the life of young playwright Laura Wade; she achieved something many more experienced playwrights rarely do by having two new plays running simultaneously in London, Breathing Corpses at the Royal Court and Colder Than Here at Soho. This was all topped off by a Critics’ Circle Award and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. Matthew Amer caught up with one of theatre’s hottest properties just days before the Laurence Olivier Award ceremony. We return to Amy’s storyline, in a cyclical ending, which, without giving too much away, provides a rather beautiful if somewhat worrying finale. The mixture of lighter scenes and lines with rather brutal violence creates an interesting juxtaposition throughout the production.