This is a beautiful play.
This is a beautiful play: a love letter to those we have lost
As Charlie's mother lies dying; his fears, lasagnes, guilt and onanistic hobbies all come crashing around him in a farcical romp of his own creation.
His "masturbatory nihilism" becomes increasingly all-consuming as he fails to deal sensitively with his mother's insidious cancer. And this is no great surprise: after all he's eighteen, a mess with a penchant for recreating his favourite television scenes, a fantasist whose long conversations with death supplant the moments he should really be spending with the woman in the bed who is desperate just to hold his hand.
Writer Ben Blais has created such a special piece: hilarious and moving in equal measure. What helps lift it above the more standard soul-searching Fringe fayre is its ability to twist the narrative and audience expectation minute by minute. As soon as you think you know what to expect from this show, it will shake and subvert your assumptions in the most charming and outrageous ways.
As Charlie, Griffyn Bellah is a bundle of nervous energy: bounding, leaping, squirming across the stage as his physical self wrangles with the emotions he cannot understand, much less process. It is a spectacular performance which traverses a range of styles and emotions with dynamism and an aching acuity. The eponymous 'mom' (an exquisitely truthful Liv Hodder) is a former actress, whose over-reliance on the words of others to express what she herself cannot forms one of the key themes of the piece. It is a trait that she has unknowingly passed to Charlie, who will find any way to wriggle away from showing us something 'real': until admonished by death (an engaging and dry Joseph Bellis) to crack on and do so. This leads to a scene of staggering ordinariness and simple beauty which stands out in relief against the high-octane shenanigans.
Charlie berates those who indulge in "slosh[es] of monotonous, formulaic storytelling" and Dead Mom Play could certainly never be accused of such literary laziness. It is a stunning, thoughtful and very very funny piece which deserves to be seen by a wide audience: and yes, is absolutely worth setting your alarms for. It is an homage to words, a love letter to those we have lost, and an admission of guilt that when they needed us most, we were not enough.
