"Your Funeral". BT Studio. Review by Josie Stern

 “Your Funeral”. BT Studio

Ask me my dramatic genre of choice on the way to a fourth Hamlet viewing of the year, and I’ll tell you honestly: “Ninety minutes, no interval.” For all the allure of playing esteemed theatre critic over a glass of house red in a humming West End bar, if I am sharing the Tube home with clubgoers just starting their nights, I know something’s gone wrong along the way. So, in a world of sprawling five-act-long plays and playwrights who’ve taken Pinter’s pauses to the very extreme, director Nick Samuel offers a welcome respite with his second original play. 

Your Funeral is a 60-minute, one-act play inspired by Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. It’s a bold claim: to do justice to a song that contends with finding beauty in impermanence and wonder in existence is no small feat, least of all within the hour. Worse still, to convey such existentialism shrewdly to a 9:30 pm crowd – dinner-fatigued and ready to switch their brains off – had me worried for the cast and crew. 

Well, Pharaoh Productions may just have pulled it off. Within the first five minutes, any fear of a stale and worn-out performance was well and truly dashed. Almost the entirety of the play centres on ex-lovers Jeff (Matt Sheldon) and Anna’s (Rebecca Harper) last encounter before the latter’s premature death, and from the very beginning, the audience is hanging on to their every word. Samuel deftly illuminates the bizarre experience of grieving a relationship that will never feel truly over – in this case, as Jeff crafts Anna’s eulogy, the grief is quite literal, but conveyed with sincerity and precision throughout. 

Samuel adeptly signals instances in which the protagonists are being their most brutally honest. When the actors collapse together in an embrace, the audience knows that the gloves are off. Equally, bursts of comedic relief, particularly the crude equating of Anna’s fatal leukaemia to a dead family dog, are deeply satisfying and cut through what could otherwise be a bleak, melodramatic hour. The writing is equal parts uninhibited and sensitive, and I had a hard time from the back of the BT studio convincing myself that I wasn’t peering into a real, private moment. 

With such a bare bones set (just a griege sofa and tangerine suitcase) and two-person cast, the risk of glacial dialogue is there, with the audience made to tune into every delicate interaction. When it paid off, it was with flying colours: a particular standout was Anna’s departure and the fight leading up to it. Here, it was clear to see that the playwright and actors understood the stakes of the exes’ goodbye, and possessed all the emotional dexterity to prove it. Yet, the unyielding focus on frank exchanges occasionally invited stilted moments. While a case could be made for hyper-realistic imperfection, dialogue that feels coarse for its own sake is harder to come to terms with. 

Rebecca Harper as Anna is truly a force to be reckoned with. Fusing grit with humour, she does well to glide fluently between layers of deception and heartbreak, of anger and fear. Anna is a complex character, and it was truly special to see Harper decode her piece by piece. Matt Sheldon, too, as Jeff was a delight. What began as a feeble, slightly kicked puppy character took on a whole different shape by the climax. That this evolution could happen so effortlessly, leaving the audience disappointed, but hardly surprised, with Jeff’s fabrication at the end of the play, is a testament to Sheldon’s mastery of nuance, subtlety, and the manipulative ex. 

Your Funeral is a raw, if self-conscious, meditation on the challenge of deciding how we want to remember those we once loved. It is a whirlwind of an hour – sharp, poignant, and despite the play’s theme, anything but a drawn-out funeral march.