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!