Theatre review: Dead Man's Cell Phone

IN A CAF, a woman hears a mobile phone ringing at a neighbouring table. Although the man who owns the phone is sitting at the table, he does not answer it; after a while, the woman investigates, and finds that the man is dead.

This is the brilliant, powerful opening scene of this 2008 play by the American playwright Sarah Ruhl, one of the rising stars of the post-postmodern generation; and, like her version of Eurydice, seen on tour in Scotland last year, the play reveals a powerful, poetic, almost mythic obsession with the parallel worlds of imagination, eternity and the afterlife which are so often excluded from everyday discourse, in this post-religious age. At first, her nondescript-looking heroine, Jean, just keeps answering Gordon's phone, explaining what has happened. Then she begins to allow other people's assumptions about why she has the phone to reshape her colourless life. And, finally, her story soars off on some kind of improbability drive, heading literally to purgatory and back, in a riot of confusing and fantastical dialogue.

It's an interesting, high-risk drama, full of absurdities, and metaphysical jokes about the disembodied voices of the dead and the living that now fill the earth's atmosphere. If its success is debatable, it receives very little help from Stasi Schaeffer's ponderous production, featuring frequent drawn-out scene-changes of a bizarrely old-fashioned kind, and some ill-judged and over-pitched acting. Susan Worfold gives a lovely, wry performance as Jean, touching lightly and wittily on the words of Ruhl's text, allowing them to speak for themselves; Vanessa Coffey is very funny as Gordon's posh and leggy widow. Elsewhere, though, this postgraduate production does a difficult text no favours, and it invites questions about what the RSAMD's directing class are learning, if not how to avoid the kind of clumsiness, and lack of flow, that weakens this show from the start.