The Funny Thing About Death

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VENUE: Greenside @ Infirmary Street

TIME: 8:50pm – 9:40pm, 5–27 Aug, not 14, 21

There are things not to like about Kim Kalish’s monologue. A self professed “theatre kid”, there’s a bit here that feels off-the-shelf drama school: the rolling hands and open palms. There’s the rom-com ideal of what true love looks like (a partner who knows your needs before you do) which feels painfully received rather than experientially given. There’s the slightly grating cod self-help exhortations of it being ok not to be ok.

And yet, despite all of that, this is gorgeous theatre, sweet enough to win over even the most curmudgeonly of audience members; technically adept enough that to gripe at perceived flaws is to miss the careful composition of the whole. The story of Kalish’s (ongoing) experience of grief after the death of the love of her life does exactly what the best theatre should do: expanding the imagination and empathy, opening a window into an experience we’ll all have, but so few of us will have the words or skill to articulate usefully.

“This isn’t going to be fun for you,” Kalish warns us, in one of a number of varied and unforced interactions with the audience. Indeed, it’s her management of tone and pace that’s most impressive here, bringing us in to punctuate the story and support step changes in the emotional force. Elsewhere she leavens the tough tale with comedy, pitched just right and with joke-writing as good as any you’ll find on the Fringe. We’re given a proper dramatic structure, a range of beautiful characterisations, some genuinely romantic moments and an emotional climax which resists easy resolution. There’s nothing flashy or fancy here: just great writing and wonderful acting, and that’s a privilage to watch. ✏︎ Evan Beswick

VENUE: Traverse Theatre

TIME: times vary, 6–28 Aug, not 8, 15, 22

From the opening video montage, Exodus wears its farcical pips on its sleeves. An ambitious Home Secretary and person of colour (remind you of anyone?) heads to Dover to dip her feet in the Channel as part of her anti-immigration posturing. An interview about a policy launch on the train north, well, it gets out of hand very quickly as all good farces should. And this is good farce: a tight four hander and there’s not a weak link in this cast.

Sophie Steer as SPAD Phoebe

Bernays delivers a masterpiece of an onstage diazepam trip. And Habiba Saleh performing her play-within-a play part of Manjula Aunty gets a beautiful part written for her by Uma Nada-Raja, and makes hay out of it (though an earnest monologue is also the clumsiest, pace-killing piece of writing in the play). But it’s as an ensemble piece that Exodus really leaps from text to stage.

But there’s a problem: in the programme notes, Uma Nada-Rajah and Debbie Hannan write of the “proximity of tragedy to farce” and Darius Fo’s idea of laughter which provokes anger rather than mollifying it. In the short years of this play’s development, the gap between lived tragedy and the play’s farcical world has continued to close, with more dinghies capsized in the channel, and a Rwandan outsourcing policy which is no less obscene than the “Project Womb” of Nada-Raja’s sharp imagination. A line about a lame duck Prime Minister is played for wry laughs, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this farce is struggling to keep ahead of tragedy. In this context, the play’s final peroration about immigration feels spot on, and horribly underpowered. In an inward, navel-gazing country gripped by the idea that it is under seige, what purpose does a scream against that within the four walls of a theatre acheive? Without a bold answer to this question, Exodus feels like fun, slick, siege mentality. ✏︎

Evan Beswick