Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Beyond Krapp
Peter McCormick and Barton Road Productions
Genre: Dark Comedy, New Writing
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
One man faces his end with an overbearing Irish catholic mother arranging his funeral whilst he sits in an Italian restaurant stuck in his own purgatory. Directed with great craft and skill, fitting within the enclosed environment like an Italian restaurant has sat you at the alcove in a corner, this keeps things taught and hilarious. The use of lighting is especially well noted as we almost get out the seats to slut drop the priest.
Review
There is something complex at play here which works very well. The complex emotions that Cormac, our solo character onstage goes through as he faces death at an age nobody should have to contemplate is in and of itself complicated. Here it finds voice in a script which acknowledges that a funeral is for the living and not the principal cast member, that being so young, Cormac has feelings and dreams unfulfilled and those he is about to leave behind have a response with which he increasingly feels has little or nothing to do with him.
It works at each level.
What also works and does so exceptionally well is our actor who shows great skill in turning this into a drama where we can feel sympathy for a dying man but at the same time see the comedy in the situations he faces and struggles with. It is a performance that needs to find that poise and that balance between the significant moments to deliver and gain sympathy and vent the frustrations of what he would love to see done to Father Kevin.
Tightly directed this fits within the cellar space we inhabit with connections between the actor and audience perhaps easier to establish due to us all being crammed in, but nevertheless this has managed to make the intimate global. The sequences where the wished for funeral comes alive and we get the lights, and the soundscape amplified works too as we get the frustrations made manifest in the dramatic wish for something more than a boring eulogy. He craves the rave, and I almost rose up to join in.
This is as far from a boring eulogy as you can get. Its own eulogy after the show comes not just in the eager chatter of a full house emerging from the gloom into the sunshine but also from the knowledge that you have seen some serious drama in the Fringe. It has been honed to the point where it can do more than communicate and make you laugh; it has the ability to make you think. I didn’t run off to the Co-Op to negotiate my own final performance, but it made me consider the ritual and pantomime of funerals. As the late child of a 41-year-old woman who was the seventh child of a family from rural Scotland, I grew up attending quite a few – my last was of my own brother. He and I were brought up in a strict protestant faith, he married into a devout catholic family and his ceremony was conducted by a Priest. The absurdity and solemnity of the event made me giggle. And once more as I left, I had those same mixed emotions – sympathy for the dear departed and similar sympathy for those of who had to go through the damn funeral!
