Franco-Uraguayan dramatist Sergio Blanco, one of South America’s most performed living playwrights, calls his work “autofiction” and he puts a writer with his name at its centre, a Sergio played here by Al Nedjari.
No that’s not quite right: actor Al Nedjari is playing himself as a ghost; it is the ghost who plays Sergio in this exhibition of layered realities—or, more accurately, fantasies.
The two other actors, Charlie MacGechan and Danny Scheinmann, are also playing their own ghosts. All three start off by telling us about their deaths: Al bleeding to death in the ocean after a great white shark had torn his leg off, Charlie killed when a car knocked him off his bike at Dalston Junction and he suffered a brain injury and Danny dying of bone cancer, who adds that he didn’t have a funeral but his family scattered his ashes from Brighton Pier.
The ghosts are now playing live people: in the play within the play that Sergio now sets up, his character is making plans for his own assisted suicide in a Dignitas-like establishment on the shores of Lake Geneva and reserves a room that looks across the lake to the house where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. He could donate organs or give his body to science, but reading a newspaper report of a necrophiliac called Khaled, now in the Bethlehem psychiatric hospital in Bromley (1930s relocation of historic Bedlam), he resolves to give it to him for his pleasure.
Danny is cast as the consultant at the suicide set-up; Sergio names him Dr Godwin after Mary Shelley’s father. Charlie is cast as Khaled who exhumes cadavers from the graveyard opposite the hospital then, after enjoying them, washes them in rosewater before returning them to their graves.
Known facts and precise details give an air of reality while it is equally obvious that some is impossible invention, but the cast do an excellent job of moving between fact and fantasy. The way the play intertwines them makes it continually engaging, and director Daniel Goldman (who also made this English adaptation) draws an improvised quality from his actors that leaves you always aware of its metatheatricality while embracing wider comment on dying and what is left behind, though with a light touch and a great deal of laughter.
Intriguingly, Khaled insists there is no physical contact between them until Sergio is dead, but, though there is a suggestion of sexual frisson between them, there’s no exploration of either this rejection of living physicality or indeed of their sexual orientation. Why does Sergio refuse to bequeath any of his estate to charities, though eventually allowing his heart to be donated to a child?
What is Richard Coeur de Lion’s sword doing in this play? Why has designer Malena Arcucci put a life-size black and white cow overhead? Sergio Blanco has said his plays combine “the facts of my life with facts I make up” and it would seem anything is possible and it does have its own kind of logic.
This isn’t a play that makes you involved with its characters, though its in-the-round staging on a round rostrum of astroturf gives it great intimacy. With the cast able to instantly switch from character to performer and question things (but all scripted, like the admiring comment they make about Sergio’s writing), it is a script that is ironically self-referential and it is that cleverness and three vibrant performances that make this an enjoyable experience.