In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein deals with his grief by constructing a creature out of stolen body parts. When animated, the limbs become hideous, creating a parable about the vainglorious urge for eternal life.
When You Walk Over My Grave is a metatheatrical take on the same idea. It is a play that itself is constructed from stolen artistic body parts – from Romeo and Juliet to the playwright’s own back catalogue, plus real figures from history’s darkest corners – in a funny and oddball commentary on our relationship with death.
Sergio Blanco, the Franco-Uruguayan writer and director whose Thebes Land played at London’s Arcola in 2016, describes the piece as autofiction, although the gap between truth and fantasy is evidently large.
Played by Sebastián Serantes, Sergio is a man with a death wish. Genial and relaxed – partly because the playwright makes sure the other characters say only nice things about him – he is more concerned about his literary legacy than his existence in the here and now. “I wrote this play to find another way to die,” he says, a line characteristic of his self-referential style.
His scheme is as striking as it is unsettling. Developing an interest in necrophiliacs, he seeks out a young man called Khaled (a mild-mannered Felipe Ipar), a resident of the Bethlem psychiatric hospital who has an unapologetic liking for sex with corpses. Instead of donating his body to science, the playwright realises he could have a useful afterlife by donating it to Khaled.
He sets off to consult a doctor (Gustavo Saffores) at an assisted-suicide clinic on Lake Geneva. Naturally, it has a view of Villa Diodati, birthplace of Frankenstein’s monster. No obstacle is put in Sergio’s way in his bid to control his exit.
The lack of resistance is part of the deadpan humour, which is offset by a tapestry of cultural allusions to death. They range from images of the resurrected Christ to the apple that temporarily kills Snow White, from the gravedigger in Hamlet to the closing scene of Thelma and Louise, from the drowning of a 10-year-old boy to the horror of a terrorist atrocity. Meaningless or momentous, the piece seems to say, death is something we just have to live with.
At Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
