★★★

“intriguing and thought provoking”

Noga Flaishon’s “Memoriam” is being sold as a science fiction. In fact, Flaishon herself goes one step further by calling it a “Jewish science fiction… now, there’s a genre you don’t see every day!”. She is half right. Her somewhat bleak but frequently humorous one-act play explores a deep part of Jewish culture, but its context is closer to science fact than fiction. Set in the near future, the themes and morals it throws up are decidedly current.

The tech company ‘Memoriam’ is able to extract human memories, digitalise them and sell them on as virtual reality experiences to subscribers who pay quite a large premium. The original intention may have been honourable, but commercialism and commodification has crept in. Those who provide their own memories sign away their rights, allowing the company to edit and sanitise them for the mass market. A bit like an author selling the film rights to a personal memoir, only to be horrified at the resulting schmaltzy blockbuster that butchers their private sense of identity and history. This dilemma is magnified when the subject covers global atrocities and genocide. The timing of this play is quite pertinent, at a disturbing time when history and living memory are becoming increasingly distorted (depending on what statistics you believe, apparently 60% of young people today cannot differentiate between fact and misinformation.)

Company employee Rachel (Rachel Barry) is under pressure to meet targets. Having secured the memories of Becky’s (Jimena Larraguivel) troubled pregnancy and labour, she is encouraged by her boss Chris (Ben Wiggins) to turn her attention to her grandmother, Rivka (Beverley Klein): the last living survivor of the Holocaust. Her brother David (Ashley Margolis) is, for dramatic purposes, vehemently against the idea, ostensibly to fuel the domestic conflicts that are inherent and central to the narrative.

Played in the round we reap the advantages and disadvantages of this choice. Ellie Wintour’s stark set gives the feel that we are looking through a cracked shell into these characters’ lives. Along with Jonathan Chan’s clinical lighting and Sarah Spencer’s cyber-infused sound design and music, we could well imagine that we are witnessing some sort of virtual reality itself. But, unable to address all of the people all of the time, many lines are lost as backs are turned and arguments spiral. An opening monologue is particularly indecipherable.

Once we are in the thick of it, we are given much food for thought. Barry’s Rachel is initially nervy and a bit geeky until her cooler pragmatic side shines through. She doesn’t question her own morals so much as to shy away from approaching the formidable figure of Rivka with the proposition. Klein’s performance of Rivka holds the piece together with a genuine and touching portrayal of the matriarch; stern and principled, yet loving and still haunted by the atrocities she has witnessed. She also comes equipped with some of the best lines.

The issues are dealt with smartly and quite astutely, even if the writing never probes too deeply. Should Rivka’s memories of the Holocaust be used for commercial gain? And, more importantly, should the company be allowed to manipulate them to make them more viewer friendly? Rivka will only consider the deal with the stipulation that they “leave them ugly”. Daniel Goldman’s direction skilfully weaves the polemic into a warm-hearted family saga, but ultimately both are a little compromised. The real impact comes when the technology is set aside and Rivka opens up to Rachel face to face. The virtual reality experience induces what Flaishon describes as “pain shock” (clumsily reenacted on the stage with dubious physicality); but a good old tête-a-tête creates the warmth, pathos, understanding and connection that is in danger of being lost forever.

“Memoriam” is intriguing and thought provoking; the satire not always hitting home, but a chilling insight into what could feasibly be just around the corner. That it is softened by placing it in a domestic setting is part of its charm. The other part is Klein’s performance, which harks back to the fine art of storytelling. There is no ‘virtual’ about the reality of that.

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!

Tag Archives: Daniel Goldman

MEMORIAM

★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

MEMORIAM

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“intriguing and thought provoking”

MEMORIAM

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 26th October 2026

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Charlie Flint

MEMORIAM

MEMORIAM

MEMORIAM

MEMORIAM

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB

★★★★★

Arcola Theatre

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”