Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling is an intergenerational story about a family in Alice Springs, Australia. Our protagonist, Gabriel York is the grandson of Henry and Elizabeth Law, who we meet in London in 1959. Gabriel York’s father, Gabriel Law, has a strained relationship with his mother as a result of her refusal to shed light on the mysterious disappearance of his father when Gabriel Law was only seven years old. This monologue, which can be found towards the end of the play, sheds light on exactly what happened to make Gabriel Law’s father leave. In this monologue, after throwing a glass on wine in his face, Elizabeth confronts her husband, Henry, about a visit she received earlier that day from two policemen, and the accusations they made against Henry. She explains how she immediately defended him to the policemen, but then as she set about cleaning and painting their house, she makes a horrifying discovery. For most of the monologue, Elizabeth is using the metaphor of cleaning their neglected home to express the realisation she’s made about their neglected relationship and all the things she’s swept under the rug, until now. A powerful dramatic monologue, with a horrifying twist. This is a play of polarity. Reality jostles with fiction as the audience navigates the set, which is formed of “rooms” delimited by cardboard boxes. In the centre there is pile of these boxes, interspersed with television screens that light up in between scenes, giving the audience a context beyond the lives we are prying into. The dialogue itself is scattered with polar oppositions, and the banal sits next to the profound; the lines which will turn out to be crucial to the plot and the play are lost in everyday speech. This banality undercuts the unravelling of the lives of the characters: when workman Ray is told that his boss has inexplicably taken all the doors off the hinges in his house in a moving and pitiful manifestation of post-traumatic stress, Ray asks “Whadya use?” and is satisfied by the response that Jim used the screwdriver lying nearby. The audience however, astonished and bemused by this and injected with dramatic irony, could never be satisfied. Another polarity: the play forces the past and the future to oppose one another, an opposition which works in such a way that any attempt to understand the chronology will ultimately fail. Oh, yes – it’s the end of days! But who exactly is complaining? The Chinese are investing in cloud seeding. Saudi Arabia is making a fortune out of drought-resistant crop technology. They’re growing food in dustbowls, and they’re making trillions in the process! If this is the apocalypse, I say bring it on! [Cheers] Along the way, we learn yet more of the talented Miss Wade's philosophy of death. Her men are not yet well-rounded and they always seem to be victims but her voice is special. While it may not be heard twice every month going forwards, there can be no doubt that she has a rich future in store.

The Production. The production is directed by David Ferry which means the production is elegant and fearless. Most of the scenes have an eerie quietness to them except one scene between a couple who are violent in their lovemaking until it turns dangerous. Where my body stops and the air around it starts has felt a little like this long continuous line of a battleground for about my whole life, I think. At just 27, Wade has gone from the playwriting equivalent of 0 to 90 in what seems like seconds. She began writing full-time only a year ago. Having two premieres in one month is, she admits, exciting and scary, but at least it relieves her of the burden that faces all first-time playwrights: of following their debut with another corker. In fact, Wade has already delivered her third play, a commission for Soho Theatre.But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."

I don’t care about the business, if you don’t want it anymore, fine, we’ll sell it I don’t care. But you’ll have to do something else. You can’t just stay at home taking the place apart with a screwdriver. The rest of the cast, too, give exceptional performances (which, I repeat, would have better fitted other surroundings, but let’s forget about that plaint for now). Helena Wilson’s Kate mauls boyfriends and household dogs. She is a hysterical and sarcastic woman with a perennially pissed off face. She swears naturally. Her partner, Ben, is played by the director, Dominic Applewhite, and he carries off the violent shifts in register well, by turns meek and murderous. Isobel Jesper Jones jabbers wonderfully as Elaine, marshalling an impressive array of tones and facial expressions – an ideal raconteuse. She is credibly despondent in the darker scenes. James Watson, as Elaine’s husband, Jim, contributes two shrewd portrayals, first of a thin-lipped bureaucrat, then of the same man traumatised. His sense of control is unassailable: he does not waste a wink. Calam Lynch as Ray is simple without being a caricature. Cassian Bilton plays a bumbling charmer, who turns out a psychopath. His look of manic fixation strikes the right note; Hugh Grant with a bloodlust for raw pigs’ entrails.Breathing Corpses is not a play about the living coping with death. It is hardly about the living but rather, as the title suggests, the half-dead: the characters had a close encounter with a cadaver, and their minds are dropsical with thoughts of death. Do they cope? Most people do, but not they. They collapse with singular ease under the weight, wreaking more death on the way. Why do they fail with such gusto? It is not explained — the play is not concerned with naturalistic minutiae. There is barely any character development. There are no motives. The portraits do not swell. The circular plot – the cunning of it – promises an antiseptic game, not a brooding tragedy, more card castle than gothic cathedral. Cleverness, at least the kind the audience would detect too readily, does not sit well with drama so intellectually, again, the play is a vacuum. No deep thoughts here. At no point does Laura Wade, the author, commit herself to ideas or convictions. She fights shy of didacticism. Faced with death, she seems to tell us, there is nothing to say. It is ‘surreal’, as one character puts it. The smart people are thriving. The smart people see business opportunity in what’s happening to our planet. We have gathered here to solve the world’s problems, and we all know the solution is Fossil Fuels! [Loud cheers.] Everything’s dying, apparently. The weather – the planet as we know it. Apparently even Capitalism itself is dying! [Laughter.] Please! You wish! [Applause.] The scene with Kate and her boyfriend, Ben, was excellently portrayed. It was easy to relate to the dialogue and her anger with her boyfriend’s seemingly endless passivity. It transpires that Kate, too, has found a body, but, rather than it traumatising her, it merely annoys her that she has to devote so much time to helping the police. The dialogue is particularly excellent in this scene. Wade is also true to her fellow young writers, preferring to take in some new writing of an evening rather than something that’s been about for a bit. Shakespeare is “quite long” she says. “I like to have some time left to go to the pub and discuss the play. I already know Shakespeare’s brilliant!” How would that very short conversation about the Bard go Miss Wade? “Masterpiece, wasn’t it? Pint?”

I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind," says Wade. "What does that do to the grieving process? Grief needs to be occupied, and organising the funeral was one way of doing that. As Myra's husband says at one point, 'The funeral isn't for you, it's for us.' But if you know someone is going to die, what do you do with the time that is left? You can't just all sit around being sad, missing them before they are actually dead and buried." The limelight is not where Wade wants to be – she uses actors to occupy that particular space – but at the recent Critics’ Circle Award ceremony she was forced to hold the attention of an audience as she collected her award for Most Promising Playwright. “I was really nervous on the day,” Wade admits, “because I’m not an enormous fan of speaking.” The ‘in public’ aspect of this particular sentence is hastily added as an after-thought. Breathing Corpses is a 2005 play by the British playwright Laura Wade which first premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. [1] Plot [ edit ] The goings on will have you gripping your arm-rest trying to figure out where this is going and where it went. The playing space of the Coal Mine Theatre is and the audience is right there, almost in the middle of the action. The design team (Steve Lucas with his set and lighting and Ming Wong with the costumes) do wonders in creating the world of the play with economy.

The American premiere, produced by Luna Theater Company, at Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, Oct 2007 with the Chicago premiere being produced by Steep Theatre Jan 2008, directed by Robin Witt. There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen.