Review: When You Pass Over My Tomb, Arcola Theatre

Quite a lot of exposition has to be done before anything can be said about When You Pass Over My Tomb.

The core plot is fairly simple, if incomprehensible. A playwright, Sergio (Al Nedjari), visits an assisted suicide clinic in Geneva. He thinks that this sounds pretty great so signs himself up, which a doctor (Danny Scheinmann) very easily agrees to. He goes to London and visits a man, Khalid (Charlie MacGechan), who is in Bethlem Hospital serving a sentence for necrophilia. He’s fascinated by Khalid and, seemingly in a spur-of-the-moment decision, decides to give his body to him after death.

The conceit is that the three actors who were meant to star in the play have died. The show must go on, though, so after an introduction that lasts far too long for its ultimate irrelevance to the story, the performance begins.

There’s no consistency to this framing, which could otherwise be interesting. Early on, one character mentions that for a play-within-a-play to work, “you have to know how to do it”. It’s dangerous for a script to set itself up like that. The frankly comical number of ‘great thinkers’ invoked throughout cements the play’s fairly lofty view of itself as ‘intellectual’, and only makes its shallowness more apparent.

The play’s entire concept attempts to push boundaries, bring into discussion complex themes of death and desire, beauty and lifelessness, art, humanity — but it never interrogates any of these, instead choosing to skate over them in favour of cheap jokes and tangents that hold little or no relevance or independent value. Some jokes land (the doctor’s advice to arrive at the clinic by public transport because “the car park’s already full” is a standout), but others very much don’t.

Characters are only vaguely fleshed out, and hints of complexities are dropped into conversation so late in the game that they’re fairly useless. In the second half, Sergio recounts some vague childhood trauma and we’re told that he’s an addict. Oh, and he’s an insomniac. In case that’s not enough to work with, it’s also casually mentioned that he doesn’t have any family. This adds nothing to the overall piece; the actors try their best to add nuance, but there’s only so much they can do.

Amid the narrative, a number of real necrophilia cases are shared with us. The latter two, if not all four, should not have been included. These are recent cases with real victims, recounted somewhat salaciously and accompanied by on-screen visual aids. Offhand jokes and comments are tone-deaf and refuse to treat what we’re told is a deeply meaningful and important phenomenon, indicative of the human condition and its approach to death and the afterlife, as anything that could have real-world implications.

In the final ‘epigraph’ act, Sergio states that he wants his heart to be donated “to an Inuit tribe” and benevolently donates his worldly wealth to “an African charity helping women through childbirth”. The reason for these decisions, we’re told, is that both groups use the thighbones of ancestors in their traditional practices, the former to carve stories into and the latter to ‘bless’ newborns. It’s as if the playwright has just completed a cursory search of ‘tribal traditions with human bones’, which feels somewhat fetishistic and completely shoehorned in.

When You Pass Over My Tomb has some interesting ideas, but fails to discuss them in any meaningful way. Its inconsistent tone and the overcomplication of its story make it difficult to take seriously either as a moral and philosophical debate or a comedy.

Written by: Sergio Blanco
Adapted and directed by: Daniel Goldman
Set and costume design by: Marlena Arcucci
Lighting and video design by: Richard Williamson
Sound design by: Hugh Sheehan

When You Pass Over My Tomb plays at the Arcola Theatre until 2 March. Further information and booking can be found here.