Dead At Last, No More Air Review - The Warren 30th May 2014

Having been forewarned by the producer that I might want to read the script and the foreward to the play before attending the performance, I had an inkling that it was going to be a bit out there: unsurprisingly I was right!

Werner  Schwab’s last play before his early death, Dead At Last, No More Air is described as a theatre-extinction comedy. Whilst I struggled to see the comedy in this piece of postdramatic theatre, I do think that if all modern theatre works were created in this vein, then the theatre for the common man would indeed be Dead At Last.

Call me old fashioned, but I like a good story. After reading the synopsis of the show I thought that there would be one, however I found that the playwright’s vile and vulgar verbose vocabulary (ironically a sentence which could have fitted well into the script) was far too self-indulgent to give any real chance to the story to take some of the foreground.

With the actors shacked by a terribly pretentious script, it is no wonder that the show left the audience somewhat speechless at the end. As it was, they didn’t do a bad job at all, with only a few very minor slips ups being more than understandable with such a barrage of literary confusion thrust upon them in the script. The removal and immediate reapplication of wigs in the middle of the dialogue seemed a little bit pointless and happened quite a few times.

The staging was quite resourceful, if a little sparse, but the creative use of the props should be commended.

Overall, I would say that this play is only for a very select few who don’t mind swearing, crude sexual references, long nonalogues (monologues without any real sense of purpose) and are genuinely curious about the philosophical aspects of theatre, what it is and what it means. For all other viewers, I feel that this might not quite be the taste of the fringe that you are looking for.