Writer and Director: James Robertson
Parasocial relationships are weird, especially when viewed from the outside. Anybody who spends even the briefest time online will run across a fan who believes that they have a genuine claim over an actor or other celebrity.
In Deadcrush, however, Maria-Vittoria Albertini Petroni’s Bronagh has a different target for her parasocial attachment. Funeral singer, Bron, was so taken by a ceremony for David in which she was called upon to perform a Carpenters song that she fell in love with the dead man.
Writer James Robertson places us three and a half months into David’s death, with Bron having inveigled herself into the life of his sister, police officer Annabel (Sammie Court). And it is here that the demands upon our suspension of disbelief already start to strain, as Bron’s unsettled behaviour would be annoying after three and a half minutes, let alone as many months.
But then, Court’s character is presented as relatively forgiving and emotionally present. A monologue about how a routine welfare check call in her job turned into the discovery of a days-old dead body displays levels of genuine emotion that Robertson’s play could do with elsewhere. Soon enough, we are back to an enforced “zany” comedy, with David’s ashes strewn about the floor and Bron valiantly attempting to shovel as much as she can into a Lidl bag full of Jaffa Cakes.
The play then proceeds to explore the issue of “ghost marriages”, or posthumous ceremonies where one or both spouses are deceased. In cultures where these are accepted, there is usually some form of inheritance or other societal or financial issue involved. Here, Bron escapes to France (where posthumous marriage is legal under certain circumstances), hoping to find someone who will marry her to her beloved. Jay Lafayette Valentine, playing first a disaffected priest and then the President of France, becomes the next victim of Bron’s increasingly demented attempts to achieve her goal.
Deadcrush has been developed over several months, with individual scenes worked upon through various scratch nights. Those developments are visible, with the most well-developed scenes feeling disjointed, conjoined by a narrative thread whose foothold in sanity is not strong enough to support its dabbling in surreal humour. One yearns for an opportunity to empathise with Bron, but there is simply not enough reality in her portrayal for the chance to engage with her as a believable character.
There is an effort to address this in the play’s final scene, a projection of a video call flashback in which Bron is having a therapy session over Zoom during the Covid lockdown. At last, we see that Robertson is not just writing about a zany character around whom vaguely comedic events happen, but a genuinely grieving woman who does not know how to handle her emotions.
If that sentiment were present on stage rather than on video, Bron’s emotional, physical, and spiritual journey would be one we could more willingly join.
Runs until 29 January 2026
