★★★

“this show reminds us how true connection can come in many forms”

Longing, vulnerability, alienation, second chances. As time passes, we are forced to take a look at our lives and reflect on the people we’ve lost, our career, who we are. Simon Stephens’ play Heisenberg, through a touching story of finding connection when you least expect it, captures the whole spectrum of human interaction, giving us poignant language along with witty banter.

Alex (Jenny Galloway), a 75-year old woman, receives an unexpected kiss on the neck from Georgie (Faline England), a bubbly American who can’t stop swearing. They start talking, or to be more accurate Georgie starts talking, firstly about herself and then trying to figure out Alex’s character by bombarding her with questions and assumptions, while Alex wants to find a way out of this conversation. A few days later, Georgie shows up at Alex’s shop and before long, a peculiar connection has formed which brings chaotic Georgie and quiet Alex closer and closer. Till Georgie asks for a favour that makes Alex question whether it’s all been fabricated or genuine.

Heisenberg is a production that creeps up on you. Awkwardness and wariness give way to authentic moments of vulnerable melancholy, side by side with hilarious one-liners. Light and dark come together in a blend that is familiar if you know Stephens’ work and writing style. The way director Katharine Farmer has handled the text, interchanging between letting the text lead the way, like a beautiful literary interval, and letting the characters shine through, is very interesting. Of course we need to appreciate the words, savour them, pay attention to them, but in a piece of theatre, the live spontaneity and action of the characters should be the focus, even in moments of wordy pondering or reminiscing. That would also help with the pacing, which feels like it’s dragging at times, the sharpness of the smart comebacks and comedic lines often suffering because of that.

The contrast between the two characters is distinct, created by two skilful and obviously experienced actors. Changing Alex’s sex from man to woman is a choice that alters the dynamic between Alex and Georgie and the impact the play has on the audience. The relationship between our two characters feels more tender, more equal, more focused on companionship. On the other hand, there is a general lack of spark and intrigue. It’s like sailing steadily in very calm waters, without any sort of fluctuation of the waves or the weather to make things more interesting and add a level of risk. Overall, it’s a choice that provides a new perspective onto the relationship, but not in a particularly successful way in the long run of the play.

Lighting designer Rajiv Pattani did not hold back and really stressed the journey’s turning points and mood changes smoothly and skilfully. Moreover, lighting assisted with the lack of any actual set, filling a stage that was left plainly bare (except for two chairs). Sound design (Hugh Sheehan) also came to the rescue, giving us clear locations by providing background noise when necessary. It’s quite an intimate stage, but still it’d be interesting to see the kind of set experimentation that could emerge to surround the actors.

Alex shares how the older she gets, the more she realises how brief life really is. And this show reminds us how true connection can come in many forms, even between people who seem like they have nothing in common. Heisenberg deals with themes that are universal and makes the passing of time, the briefness and vastness of life, feel a little less lonely.

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!

HEISENBERG

Arcola Theatre

★★★

“this show reminds us how true connection can come in many forms”

HEISENBERG

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed on 14th April 2025

by Stephanie Christodoulidou

Photography by Charlie Flint

Previously reviewed at this venue:

HEISENBERG

HEISENBERG

HEISENBERG

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”

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB at the Arcola Theatre

Reviewed on 12th February 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB

WHEN YOU PASS OVER MY TOMB