Wireless Theatre Company, January 2012
Geoff (Richard Holt) is a man under pressure. A young colleague of his
has just invested £200m. in a faulty deal, resulting in a lost of over £1.2bn. for his bank. He drives home in desperation,
cursing all the while at the heavy traffic, and opens his computer. His girlfriend Sam (Ann Theato) tries to console him,
but he responds abusively. His eye is bloodshot - the result, perhaps, of a burst blood-vessel due to stress. In the end Geoff
has a heart-attack and collapses to the ground.
He wakes up later on in the morgue: although he can hear Sam talking, no one appears
to hear him. In desperation he screams out loud, but appears locked in a cocoon of silence. Two morticians (Matthew Jure,
Alex Hall) begin to work on him to determine the cause of death, but they are suddenly interrupted by Sam, who insists that
her boyfriend is still alive. Although they have no reason to do so, they suspend their work and re-examine the corpse ....
This scenario provides the pretext for a macabre tale of revenge, in which Geoff
gets his just deserts. During his lifetime he was nothing more than a boor, spending most of his waking hours hunched in front
of a screen making money. Rather than taking care of Sam, he spent his limited leisure time smoking, drinking and carousing.
Now it's payback time.
Recorded in 3-D, Mariele Runacre Temple's production ingeniously employed overlapping
voices to suggest different levels of reality: while Geoff thinks he is still part of the living world, and able to hear Sam
talking, he is actually dead. The act of revenge might be actually happening, or it might just be a product of Geoff's turbulent
mind. One thing is certain however; he gets what he deserves.
One word of warning: while this production proves compelling, it does contain strong
language, and is not recommended for listeners under sixteen years old.
