A Dead Man’s Dying

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on A DEAD MAN’S DYING at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 2.3.11
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3 stars ***

AT A TIME WHEN REBELLION against bloated and bullying elites is sweeping whole regions of the world, Esteban Navajes Cortes’s fifty-five minute farce A Dead Man’s Dying is, or should be, the play with everything. Staged as this week’s new offering in the NTS/Play,Pie and Pint Latin American season – and due at the Traverse next week – the play is set in the master bedroom of a country house somewhere in Colombia, where the local landowner, Agustino, apparently lies dead on his bed. His black-clad widow, Carmen, weeps and prays at his side; and two surly peasants, Benigno and Otilia, eye the scene with a sceptical and slightly threatening air.

For it seems that outside the big house, things are changing. Flooded out by endless rain, the peasants are rising up and occupying Agustino’s land; and it soon becomes clear that his apparent death is just another scam in the long game of power, designed to keep him safe from the wrath of the people until the soldiers arrive to put them back in their place.

Carmen and Agostino, in other words, represent the still-arrogant remnants of a boss-class whose time has run out, but who are too lost in their own world of unearned privilege to recognise their plight. The play’s comedy comes mainly from the efforts of this not-unlikeable couple to maintain the fiction of Agustino’s death, while whiling away the long hours of vigil with knockabout memories of happier times; Lewis Howden and Anne Lacey are in their element as this rowdy pair of middle-aged bon viveurs, oblivious of their fate.

Somehow, though, in Davey Anderson’s version (which he also directs) the comedy often seems more leaden than it should, as if this excellent cast – also featuring Barrie Hunter and Mairi Morrison – still has to find the right knife-sharp lightness of pace and tone to make this deadly serious farce work at full strength. The end is chilling, though, and intensely political; funny, grotesque, and stuffed with metaphors, like Agustino’s overweight coffin.

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