Theatre review: The Great Disappointment... Oran Mor, Glasgow

WHAT is there, really, to say about death? It’s inevitable, and often sad; but only the childish, the depressive and those obsessed with their own immortality waste any more attention on it than it absolutely demands.

The Great Disappointment...

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Star rating: * *

In setting herself up as a self-absorbed young actor struggling to prepare for the role of Death in a Mexican Day of the Dead pageant, the Glasgow-based writer and performer Amanda Monfrooe therefore embarks on a high-risk project. Over 45 minutes, in a monologue which she performs herself, she shows her heroine inspecting dead pigeons in the street, receiving a visit from the black dog of depression, and offering her five-year-old nephew earth as a birthday present; the running joke is she’s so self-absorbed she can’t even remember to feed her goldfish, which eventually dies.

Some of these episodes are pleasingly surreal, others are plain embarrassing; and the sequences in which we see our her exchanging philosophical thoughts with herself as she waits to “go on”, are agonising examples of overwritten poetry mistaking itself for a playscript.

Some of the language is vivid, and there’s plenty of passion and politics in Monfrooe’s descriptions of the way we live now. But if she wants to show her character’s preoccupation with death as silly, her own interest in it often seems as unattractive. It’s as though the actor’s story and the writer’s ironic view of it keep collapsing into one another; the writer no less determined than the actor to fight her way through this youthful argument with the inevitable, towards a statement of the blooming obvious.