Writer: Lucy Josèphine
Director: Henry Roberts
Teach Me About Dying is Moosk! Theatre Production’s show for the Camden Fringe. Written by Lucy Josèphine who directs with Henry Roberts, it starts with a neat idea. What if, when you’re only 23, the actual, real-life Grim Reaper shows up as an elegant young woman and announces it’s your time to die? It doesn’t seem to matter that her titchy sickle looks unfit for purpose: Ava (Anya Hope Birch), our heroine, has no escape. She’s due a brain aneurysm any moment.
She’s just had one escape – moving out from her well-meaning boyfriend Tom (Matthew McGoldrick) who will appear throughout the show to deliver needy voice messages which suggest she dodged a bullet there. Their arrangement for joint custody of their cat continues to hold them together. Rather too much of the show depends on our finding this cat-thing cute.
Charisse Allen-Filo as Death agrees to an arbitrary extension of Ava’s death sentence by five weeks. After this set-up, Teach Me About Dying encounters the same dramatic problem that Christopher Marlowe and Goethe both faced in telling the Faust story: how do you fill the middle part before the inevitable ending?
Josèphine’s solution is for Ava to find a bucket list she somewhat improbably wrote at 14. It’s not a particularly ambitious one. Taking a road trip is rejected, so she and Death settle down in her sitting room to watch box sets of Dr Who, as you would when you’ve only a few weeks to live. Ava plans an underwhelming dinner party. But the important thing is there’s clearly a vibe going on between Ava and Death.
There are long periods of silence – hard to pull off in the theatre – when Ava and Death are companionably reading. There are other long periods where they play chess. Disappointingly, this doesn’t seem to be a reference to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Ava is half in love with easeful death, so the end, when it comes, is sweet. Needy Tom gets to play the whole gamut of emotions from anguished to blissful. The cat, as far as we know, survives.
Runs until 24 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
Undercooked
The Reviews Hub Score
The performance and witness tonight was simply brilliant. It was funny poignant and moving. The whole production was delivered with aplomb.
Whilst I recognised the plot spoilers in this review, there was little or no critique of the actual performance nor any guidance or suggestions for improvement. The performance eyewitness tonight definitely deserves a much higher ranking than the measly two stars given in this review.
This is only the Moosk production team’s Second production and I’m sure each performance will have been an improvement on the last. On the evidence of tonight’s performance, the cast and production team have bright future careers ahead of them.
Attended the third night of this production as a fan of emerging theatre and have to take issue with the synopsis posted here.
In a world where entertainment is measured in the numbers of whizz-bangs and instant gratification, being able to enter another world where we see a differently paced view of the blurred line between life and death for an hour, is a pleasurable diversion.
Death is played, and playfully played by Charisse Allen-Filo in her breakout performance, sassy yet vulnerable, even the grim reaper suffers from a lack of job satisfaction. Henry Roberts takes the writing and brings it to life with clever use of staging, lighting, atmospheric music and props. This allows the cast to deliver their performances in a dynamic setting, generating laughter and tears with an unexpected but poignant ending.
If your reviewer feels this is undercooked, good job I enjoy sushi and cookie dough (obviously not together)