RIP Buster. He’s in a better place where he won’t have to wear that cone of shame. Still, the news is hard for five-year-old Graciela. Her pet’s death is the first she has encountered. She blames her parents: “You made my doggy dead.”
First it’s Buster then, five years later, Grandma. As Jacob Marx Rice’s play proceeds to commemorate each loved one who dies during Graciela’s life, the suspense – and rising death toll – momentarily evokes an Agatha Christie thriller. Yet the only mystery is the eternal one: not whodunnit but what happens afterwards.
In a cast of five, Vivia Font skilfully plays Graciela from preschooler to octogenarian, ageing affectingly. One minute she is a boisterous child, the next a brittle teen, face-palming at mum’s mortifying behaviour. The script subtly parallels scenes from her childhood and adulthood, and it’s moving to see the daughter become a parent. A precarious balance of pain and humour is deftly retained throughout, with astute observations on the profound and banal ways that death disrupts our lives. “Death should come by raven or something. Not a Yahoo inbox,” says 23-year-old Graciela.
When she hits her 70s, the news proliferates – the illnesses named but not the deceased. Heart attack, diabetes, cancer. The causes of death bring to mind Forced Entertainment’s staggering First Night, in which they were disturbingly assigned to individual audience members. The difference here is that, despite a cosy setup that seats actors among the front row as if in a family room, the play’s grand sweep and high concept sometimes keep us at a remove.
The play is staged with sensitivity by Alex Howarth but as Graciela’s family grows over the decades you lose the sense of interior lives that marked Howarth’s heart-rending (and less sentimental) Cassie and the Lights. A recurring ritual marks deaths through communal moments of song and snapshots (part of Rachel Sampley’s video design) shown on a gauze that also, less successfully, represents “the other side”.
The play is well performed by Kathryn Akin, Amelia Campbell, Alejandro De Mesa and Siphiwo Mahlentle beneath designer Alice McNicholas’s golden cluster of lightbulbs that glow when a character dies. It’s a warm and thoughtful night, even if it never quite captures the impact of death on the way we live.
• At the Finborough theatre, London, until 10 June
