BWW Reviews: DEAD AT LAST, NO MORE AIR, Camden People's Theatre, May 7 2014

In Dead at last, no more air (at Camden People's Theatre until 17 May) actors bicker, as actors do, and the director and the writer bicker (as they do) and the play stalls. Suddenly, a cleaning woman - not without a few opinions of her own - turns up, takes over and replaces the actors with the residents of a local old people's home. Before long, everything's gone a bit "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and "Lord Of The Flies" with the play forgotten as theatre, indeed lives, become the stakes in a dystopian nightmare.

But it's ever such hard work. The writer, the late Werner Schwab, never intended entertainment (how about this line, "Love is nature frankly also, one might say, a kind of zombified season continually sensing in itself the forgetfulness that it in fact was here before"), but does it have to be so relentless? The actors give full-blooded performances, but their characters do not so much converse as exclaim statements which - written down - may be searingly insightful, but, over ninety minutes, are simply too much to take in.

There's room for the offensive and the avant-garde on London's fringe and it's great to see European theatre given a chance (after all, there are a lot of American accents on the capital's stages). Having said that, this production did remind me a little of some of Klaus Kinski's early stage work in the 1950s, all confrontation and bleakest comedy. There's an audience for it too, but probably comprising those with more of an academic grounding in theatre than me and one that hasn't spent the previous eight hours or so answering emails.

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