This one hour play by David Moreland initially appears to tackle euthanasia. We watch a middle-aged man named Jerry step into a shop called Voluntary Departure for people contemplating suicide. It might be better named Indignitas; an unhinged receptionist named Peter (but played by a woman) offers a range of grizzly get-out plans including - but not limited to - poison, decapitation and gunfire.
It gradually emerges that we're somewhere in the near-future, when Europe has a President and 'the Middle-East is at peace' or so the newspapers say. In fact, its a 1984-style dystopia: the government is cracking down on surveillance and every citizen has an 'e-ID' implanted into their forehead. Religion appears to be outlawed but the rise of religious evangelicalism is threatening a revolution, and citizens are encouraged to sell out any Christian family members or friends in order to stamp it out.
The script plays on some of the concerns of our age and there's a palpable sense of a culture of fear, but it fails to ask any profound questions about state authority, secularism or indeed suicide. Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon are name-dropped as cultural signposts that lead nowhere. It’s also supposedly a comedy but the attempts at gallows humour tend to fall flat and some rather flaccid word-play is more groan-inducing than anything else: Jerry only reads the financial times and 'the times are financially bad'.
The two actors are clearly accomplished and do their best with the material. They occasionally raise a laugh with their verbal interplay but the direction is also unimaginative and the set distractingly, inexplicably strange - the figure of death sits throughout in the form of a halloween mask mounted on a dummy and Peter's desk telephone is Dali's lobster sculpture.
Comprised of one bloated scene, the play fumbles between pseudo-philosophical intrigue and lost moments of dramatic tension. Hovering between life and death with a man named Peter (presumably as in Saint), we're clearly supposed to interpret this as a surreal, politically charged pearly gates scenario. As a theatrical experience, however, it's more like purgatory: a seemingly endless mess of themes and an ending with neither resolution nor tangible conflict.
