An Obviously Very Sad Play – Camden Fringe 2023, The Cockpit Theatre

Writer and Director: Izzy Burton

Counterintuitively, funerals can be seriously good events. It’s a time for families and friends to come together, say nice things about a loved one and feel glad about being alive.

Of course, they’re also times when underlying seams of tension can come bursting to the surface with huge force and devastating consequences.

Either one of these potential funeral styles presents a golden opportunity for comedy, something writer and director Izzy Burton has grabbed hold of as an idea for this short, chaotic play.

We, the audience, are here to attend the wake of Philip Spanker, a rich father of four. With one of the adult offspring institutionalised following “the incident,” it’s left to the three other generally awful members of the family to host the event with their partners and read the will. What follows is more of an effort than an execution of a comedy play. It starts with lazy, tired jokes about northerners and silly rich people, and descends into nuance-free and madcap nonsense. The reliance on flat, predictable stereotypes is dull at first then gets uncomfortable with the treatment of the heavily pregnant, gold-digging sex worker Kat becoming particularly grating.

It’s billed as slapstick, but there’s little trace of the physicality or choreography that term suggests. Instead, we have rambling, overwrought punchlines with none of the elegance of farce, or the thoughtful surprise of good comedy.

Some cutaway scenes set in a kitchen at the back of the funeral venue, videoed in advance and projected on the back wall, provide a little break in the on-stage proceedings but even these rely on repetitive jokes to try and catch our interest.

It all has the air of improv from a group who weren’t expecting it. Sluggish characters, undignified begging for laughs through stale jokes and sequences and unsatisfying story-building all combine to deliver on an idea that may seem great on paper but needs much more consideration before it comes back to the stage.

Reviewed on 15 August 2023

Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023