There’s a Dead Body in My Living Room – Camden Fringe, Etcetera Theatre

Writer: Naima Sjoholm

Director: Belle Bao

As concepts go, Naima Sjoholm’s There’s a Dead Body in My Living Room is a catchy and self-explanatory one that will help this show stand out among the hundreds on offer at Camden Fringe. Showing at the Etcetera Theatre, this one-hour play is neatly staged, following the discover-investigate-speculate method of police procedurals with a darkly comic twist.

Returning from an exhausting day at work, journalist Steph is shocked and irritated to discover a dead man slumped in a chair, with boyfriend Michael nowhere to been seen and no idea who the victim is. Steph tries to piece together what happened and what exactly she ought to do about it.

Sjoholm’s story has some clever touches; the flashbacks to scenarios with Michael help to give context to Steph’s life with him and the circumstances in which the crime might have occurred, while her thinking-out-loud notions exploring various possible explanations, enacted by Michael and corpse Steve, are well managed, spinning what could have been a thin idea beyond the title into a much fuller concept.

And Sjoholm throws in some interesting dramatic concepts to build her central character who speaks directly to the audience and whose first instinct is not to contact the police but to try to figure it all out for herself. A CSI-style assessment of the facts is fun, with Steph adopting a slicked back hairstyle and Miami Vice sunglasses, while the memories of Michael’s angry reaction to a barman in a noisy club and even to a dinner Steph makes for him lead the audience towards a number of assumptions about this crime and its perpetrator that are the bedrock of the murder drama genre.

But Sjoholm leaves room for ambiguity towards the end, opening the door to notions of unreliable narrators and events not being quite as perceived. More of that could be brought into There’s a Dead Body in My Living Room a little earlier because the central premise as presented runs out of steam before its more interesting conclusion.

Perhaps Michael needs to return much sooner to challenge the impression the audience has been given of him in flashbacks and in the discovery of this crime, and, amusing though it is that Steve the corpse has to remove himself from the living room to facilitate earlier scenes, a greater concentration on the victim could flesh out his relationship to the couple that cost him his life. That needn’t change Sjoholm’s ambiguous conclusion, but it would introduce a greater variety of dramatic opportunities to present to the audience.

Performed by Sjoholm as Steph, Alberts Vecmanis as the dubious Michael and William Lewis as Steve, There’s a Dead Body in My Living Room makes much of its promising title but as with all crime drama, there could be more beneath the surface.

Runs until 28 August 2022

The Camden Fringe runs from 1-28 August 2022