★★★

“his command of accents and impersonation is considerable.”

During Nick Cohen’s “Life with Oscar”, we are increasingly reminded of the old aphorism concerning barks and bites. Or perhaps, more appropriately, that thing about tins and what is said on them. Cohen may be barking mad, but his seventy-minute show about his experiences in Hollywood doesn’t have the bite we were expecting. The marketing copy promises something more dangerous; darker and more revelatory.

Perhaps the anecdotal material is spread too thin. He adopts thirty-one characters in little over an hour after all. He begins as himself, affable and self-deprecatory. A self-confessed wannabe director and actor. Betraying his ‘Theatre de Complicité’ training he whirls us backwards and forwards in time with sharp movements, and his command of accents and impersonation is considerable. It’s quite convoluted, but the main thrust of the narrative is that he is invited to Hollywood by a double Oscar winner who promises Cohen a short cut to his own Oscar win. Preceding this, though, we spend a fair chunk of the evening in the company of the child Cohen – precocious yet naïve, and programmed to fulfil the failed dreams of his celebrity parents.

The dream that Cohen takes to ‘La La Land’ with him is an unformed idea for a short film. The escapades that follow are similarly unformed and sometimes anticlimactic. And although we are asked to believe that each anecdote is verbatim, we are aware of the artistic licence taken. And therein lies the frustration. Cohen plays with the truth too gently. We are enticed by the promise of portraits of the psychopaths, the crazies, the predators and the prey. A descent into the madness of Tinseltown. But it is gentler than that. A comfortable performer, Cohen doesn’t always have a tight hold on our attention and the multitude of characters often pass by in a blur.

He has chosen a theme that is well documented already on film and in modern literature. We are obviously not expecting the outrageous excess of Damien Chazelle’s ‘Babylon’, nor the incisive prose of Budd Schulberg’s ‘The Disenchanted’. However, we are let down by Cohen’s inconsequential and indulgent writing. Writing that never quite hits its target. He talks of eventually escaping Hollywood, yet we never get the sense that he was trapped there. He equates his producer friend’s illusory promise of securing him an Oscar with the failure of the American Dream. This self-aggrandising is at odds with the self-deprecating modesty that informs the comedy of the piece – Cohen is better at mocking himself than the famous names he keeps dropping.

“Life with Oscar” isn’t quite what it says on the tin. Cohen has prised open the lid to give us a glimpse of what might be inside, but we are left thinking that he has less to tell us than what’s on the label. He can certainly spin a yarn, though, and the show is peppered with good humour. But ultimately a bit of an anti-climax.

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB at the Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Challenging, stimulating, playful, thrilling, but above all, it defies categorisation.”

At curtain call, Al Nedjari, the actor playing the writer of “When You Walk Over My Tomb” announces that there is somebody in the audience ‘pretending to be me’. He invites the real-life Sergio Blanco onstage. We are almost convinced it is this way round, such is the blurring of truth and fiction. We have forgotten by now that Nedjari isn’t, in fact, Blanco, and that Charlie MacGechan and Danny Scheinmann are not their onstage characters too. The acting is so natural and quasi-improvised that we have been utterly drawn into the surreal, stark, seductive fiction.

Two hours earlier, the trio emerge from within the audience and introduce themselves as ghosts, recounting how they each died, before slipping into their characters for the main narrative. “When You Walk Over My Tomb” recounts the author’s last days having decided to arrange his own assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic run by Dr. Godwin (Scheinmann). He has resolved to donate his body to a convicted necrophiliac, Khaled (MacGechan), interned in the Bethlem psychiatric hospital in London (“what difference is there between donating my body to science and donating it to someone who might find pleasure in it when I’m dead”). The play unfolds, alternating between the playwright’s encounters with the doctor and the young man who is lustfully preparing to receive his corpse after his death. We lose count of the taboos that are broken as we try to keep up with the uncomfortable yet dizzyingly fascinating and often beautiful prose. There are several references to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and, indeed, this play is its own chimera – a monster compounded of incongruous parts. Simultaneously tragic and hopeful. A love letter to life but lusting for death. It even has its own epitaph rather than an epilogue.

“the acting skills of Nedjari, MacGechan and Scheinmann alchemise the complex material into gorgeous bitesize pieces of entertainment that highlight every line of the brilliant material”

“When You Walk Over My Tomb” follows the success of Blanco’s OFFIE award winning ‘Thebes Land’ and ‘The Rage of Narcissus’ at the Arcola Theatre. One of the world’s most performed living Spanish-language writers, his current work is brilliantly adapted and directed by Daniel Goldman who has teased out the themes of death, eroticism, passion, desire, mortality and the afterlife with a surgeon’s skill while still dressing the harrowing subject matter in swathes of humour. Cultural references are thrown in left right and centre from Shakespeare to the Brothers Grimm, Byron, Shelly, Flaubert, Bach, Lennon. Religious iconography becomes pornography, while a drowned child’s discarded Playmobil toy adopts the same potent symbolism of Yorick’s skull.

It is as though the concept of the play within a play is being reflected from parallel mirrors and stretched to infinity. But the acting skills of Nedjari, MacGechan and Scheinmann alchemise the complex material into gorgeous bitesize pieces of entertainment that highlight every line of the brilliant material. Blanco takes time out to explain certain matters, such as the subtle differences between euthanasia and assisted suicide. The doctor recounts some cases (real life or fictional we’re never quite sure) of necrophilia. But it is never expositional. The cast involve the audience at times, or address the tech box, giving cues to the operator – but it is never contrived. The actors blur their real selves with their on-stage personas, but we never lose sight of the distinction. It has been dubbed autofiction and, although the audience doesn’t question it, the actors often wryly step out of character, interrupting the action to ask what aspects of this show are actually real.

Challenging, stimulating, playful, thrilling, but above all, it defies categorisation. One can describe the patterns of a kaleidoscope, but it is only when you hold it up to the eye that you grasp the true beauty. “When You Walk Over My Tomb” is one of those pieces of theatre that has to be seen to be believed. Original, perverse, intoxicating. Funny and sad; it will make you look at life another way. And death. And what lies between and possibly after. A must-see triumph. I bet you’re dying to see it!

LIFE WITH OSCAR at the Arcola Theatre

★★★

“his command of accents and impersonation is considerable.”

LIFE WITH OSCAR at the Arcola Theatre

Reviewed on 3rd April 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by G Taylor

Previously reviewed at this venue:

LIFE WITH OSCAR

LIFE WITH OSCAR

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB at the Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Challenging, stimulating, playful, thrilling, but above all, it defies categorisation.”

“the acting skills of Nedjari, MacGechan and Scheinmann alchemise the complex material into gorgeous bitesize pieces of entertainment that highlight every line of the brilliant material”