A metaphor, a perfect place to hide a body
Breathing Corpses (out of 4) Written by Laura Wade, directed by David Ferry. Until Nov. 13 at the Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Ave. Coalminetheatre.com.
“I’m so angry. I’m so f----ing f----ing angry,” rages Kate (Kim Nelson), a self-employed, 30-something Englishwoman to her younger boyfriend Ben (Benjamin Sutherland).
The particular trigger for Kate’s outburst is that, while walking Ben’s dog a day before, she found a young woman’s body under a bush. She feels bad for the dead girl, but she’s also pissed off that the police investigation is disrupting her schedule.
Laura Wade’s 2005 play is on one level a thriller about a web of dead bodies, including the one Kate found, and the way they’re all connected. But it’s also about the narcissism, desolation and anomie that create the pre-existing condition of Kate’s uncontrollable anger (evidence of which is visible in the welts and bruises all over Ben’s torso).
Wade’s title is a reference to Sophocles’s observation that people who’ve lost all happiness live in a state of walking death. A key location is a self-storage facility — a perfect place to hide a body, but also a metaphor for globalized society: a soulless repository for all the useless excess stuff in which we invest, in place of sustained relationships and commitment to community.
The play’s five scenes initially seem disconnected and it’s the audience’s job to piece them together. Clues start to add up — major plot points and also tiny details — but the ending, while structurally perfect, is literally impossible. What starts out like a daisy chain doubles in on itself and implodes.
While Wade’s youthful ambitions are admirable, she hands a production company a significant challenge to deliver.
Director David Ferry and an excellent company of seven actors tackle the material with intelligence and great energy. Play and production get off to a wobbly start by saddling Erin Humphry’s character Amy, a chambermaid, with a monologue delivered to a dead body she discovers in a hotel bed: this means of getting her to speak feels contrived, and having her be Irish extends a cliché of that culture’s subservience to the UK.
While Steve Lucas’s set of several large boxes and a series of sliding panels is in many ways ingenious, it sends some distractingly faulty signals: as Amy explicitly informs us in this opening scene that we’re not in London but rather some nowhere town she calls a “bloody sh--hole”, why is the backdrop a map of the British capital reminiscent of the opening credits of Eastenders?
There’s also a missed step in the imprecision of Amy’s costume (design by Ming Wong): the desire to create a moody grey colour scheme seems to have trumped the inclusion of details the plot depends upon.
The sense of people fighting to sustain human connection against the societal odds is most successfully captured in two scenes featuring the self-storage facility manager Jim (Richard Sheridan Willis).
When he discovers the source of a nasty smell coming from one of his units, he goes on a downward spiral from which his empty-nest wife Elaine (Severn Thompson) and his sweetly devoted assistant Ray (Simon Bracken) try desperately to save him.
The warmth the three performers generate contrasts effectively with the toxicity of the Kate-Ben relationship. Nelson and Sutherland bring total emotional, psychic and physical commitment to their pivotal scene, which builds towards violence).
While a final hotel room encounter between Humphry and Johnathan Sousa crackles with complex tensions, this is where, for this viewer, Wade’s conceit falters: we don’t find out enough about Sousa’s character to understand where he fits in her overall commentary.
Even if the play doesn’t fully deliver on its ambitions, its adventurousness and depth of thought are bracing. It’s great to have Wade’s work produced in Toronto alongside that of better-known British playwrights of her generation. Their attempts to capture the atomized, globalized, hyper-capitalized nature of our times bring new life to the dramatic form.