Black gallows humour is what this piece should be about, with a touch of hilarity, but this offering misses the noose and falls flat between two stools, swinging lifelessly. Better luck next time.Rating
Ok
Continuing my visits to the vibrant Lambeth Fringe that is raging away in South London at the moment, across twenty-six venues no less, I rolled up to the Golden Goose Theatre in the Oval to see The Dying Wish, a new play by Brazilian playwright Mauro Fazon.
Fazon is evidently inspired by the likes of Dario Fo, and this piece has aspirations to be another Accidental Death of an Anarchist – an absurdist farce that at the same time made a strong political point about authoritarian bureaucratic society.
The essential plot concerns two executioners, Ingmar (Chris Gallagher) and Rooney (Omar Agar) who far prefer to be hangmen, although an engineer (Cyril Auclair) has developed an electric chair. He tries to explain the mechanics to the two, only to kill himself in the process, helped by a cleaner (Iago Cabrero) who seems to be wandering about aimlessly in the background – why?? The prisoner, Paul Freeman (geddit?), is brought in in a bemused state, played with refreshing truth by Chris Machari.
A sequence of crazy, way-over-the-top characters intervene, seemingly allowed into the death chamber with impunity. So, we have an increasingly deranged attorney (Romeo Olukotun) who is conjuring up even more bizarre charges against our hapless death row victim, then a mother (Andrea Furlotti), dispensing home-made biscuits to her son and the executioners, and finally, our prisoner’s frantic child, Kiddy (Precious Scott), hysterically desperate for her next drug fix (!!!). Now you may well say, “But hang on a minute, this is farce, anything goes, ‘go with the flow, man’ and all that”, but for farce you need truth as a starting point, whether it be the location, the setting or a scintilla of believability in the characters. Otherwise, you cannot engage in the world of zaniness. The result is that the heightened attempts at humour became more and more laboured and frankly desperately unfunny. I found I couldn’t care less about anything or anybody over the 55 minutes of this piece.
Of all the actors on the bonkers side, Agar as Rooney, has a nice line in camp po-facedness – an interesting choice for the character of a hangman. He indeed raises a few titters in his world-weary put-downs, as the two debate their futures in the executioner world. As I hinted above, Camachi is the only actor with refreshing truth; his dying wish of the title is to play the piano – a commendable and pleasant attempt at ‘Air on a G String’ which made me think of the iconic Hamlet advert (Who could forget Rab C Nesbitt in the photo booth? hilarious). Is this perhaps an intentional reference to the cigar-smoker accepting his fate in the original pay-off gag?
As to the lighting, it is non-existent – it felt like the house-lights were on all the way through, which, if this was deliberate, didn’t work, as it further alienated the audience. Sound barely registered, to coin a phrase, so, no redemption there.
I could say this piece needs much more work, but without that key element of truth at the core it will always lack a solid base for success.
Written by Maurizio Fazion
Directed by Verônica Sarno
Produced by Claire-Monique Martin
The Dying Wish has completed its current run.
