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. 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. 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.

The scene changes to Jim’s story and how he discovered a body in one of his units. The quote from the play’s advert: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse ”is certainly bleak, and the character it most applies to is Jim. The unfolding story isn’t, however, so full of despair that it is depressing; more, it reminds us of human frailty and how easily happiness, or what passes for it, can be destroyed through a single moment. For two days this month, Laura Wade will enjoy a unique double. She will have her first and second plays running simultaneously at two of Britain's leading new-writing venues. As her debut, Colder Than Here, draws to a close at the Soho Theatre in London, her second, Breathing Corpses, will just begin its season at the Royal Court. "It is," says Wade, "a bit like having Christmas happen twice over." 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- 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. Wade is also true to her fellow young writers, preferring to take in some new writing of an evening rather than something that’s been about for a bit. Shakespeare is “quite long” she says. “I like to have some time left to go to the pub and discuss the play. I already know Shakespeare’s brilliant!” How would that very short conversation about the Bard go Miss Wade? “Masterpiece, wasn’t it? Pint?”

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. Breathing Corpses is a 2005 play by the British playwright Laura Wade which first premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. [1] Plot [ edit ] Along the way, we learn yet more of the talented Miss Wade's philosophy of death. Her men are not yet well-rounded and they always seem to be victims but her voice is special. While it may not be heard twice every month going forwards, there can be no doubt that she has a rich future in store. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

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. After its initial premiere it has since been produced in Sydney 2006, The Hague 2007 and most recently Melbourne 2016. [4] The British regional premiere was at Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol 2007 presented by Plain Clothes Theatre Productions. It subsequently toured to the Cheltenham Everyman Studio. The production won Venue magazine's Best Play of 2007. The smart people are thriving. The smart people see business opportunity in what’s happening to our planet. We have gathered here to solve the world’s problems, and we all know the solution is Fossil Fuels! [Loud cheers.] The Children also has two monologues for the other female character in the play, Hazel. Hazel is a retired mother of four; she practices yoga, she’s super-organised, and is the epitome of domestic efficiency. She lives on a farm with her husband, and has led an environmentally responsible life that she feels now warrants being a little selfish. Her monologue, early in the play, is about the decision she and Robin made to stay and fix up their property, and look after their animals, despite what she feels; that they had earnt the right to take the easier route just this one time. It begins “And then I had this amazing thought: we don’t have to. We don’t actually have to. To clear it up.” 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.A gripping play in five scenes that are connected in ever twisting mystery. It’s beautifully acted and directed. It is about people trying to live and deal with what life throws at them - the desperate fight for happiness," says Wade. "I've always been fascinated by those newspaper reports about people out walking the dog who discover a body in the bushes. For a short time they are at the heart of the story, and then what happened to the corpse becomes the focus and the person who found the body passes into obscurity. But they have to live every day with the knowledge of what they found. It's the idea that once you've lifted the lid and looked inside the box, what you've seen stays with you. You can't unsee what you have witnessed."

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. Verdict: Breathing Corpses is a unique experience for an audience member and the whole team must be applauded for their collaboration on this dark, multi-faceted, exciting production.The last scene is also troublesome. Without giving too much away I will say that, although we are made to empathise with and understand the previous events that take place in the play, this last one comes across as a lazy way to end. A character is introduced supposedly to wrap the whole thing up, but because he is stereotypical and one-dimensional, he ends up doing nothing of the sort. This character stands out like a sore thumb, perhaps because the others are so well-crafted. Certainly in 2005, with Breathing Corpses, Wade is obviously an elegant, muscular and fearless writer. The title comes from Sophocles of all people: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.” The same can be said of women too. The American premiere, produced by Luna Theater Company, at Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, Oct 2007 with the Chicago premiere being produced by Steep Theatre Jan 2008, directed by Robin Witt. The scene opens with a hotel room and a corpse. The Burton Taylor Studio's intimate stage allows Amy to come into the room and apologise for disturbing the audience before it becomes clear she has discovered yet another body. She proceeds to talk to the body of Jim for some time, interspersing humour (“not surprised you didn’t touch the shortbread”), realism (“why wouldn’t you do this at the Ritz instead of a dump like this”) and poignancy (“do you miss the sky?”). 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.