Curating. Drayton Arms Theatre.

Goofy twenty-something Freya sells insurance in a London call centre but has dreams of becoming a contemporary impressionist painter. Sadly, her ambitions have to put on hold when she is hit by a bus and wakes up some hours later in what seems to be the afterlife. Her “personal curator” Mark, snappily bedecked in tartan suit and bow tie, is fuming. The office intern has messed up Freya’s paperwork and it is not entirely clear in which direction her mortal soul is supposed to be heading.

Things get more complicated for Freya (Helen Cunningham who also wrote the piece) when taxidermist John (Joshua Samuels who seems to accept his fate a tad too stoically) wonders in from the dingy office next door. John died of tuberculosis back in 1898 but his curator Matilda (Andrea Johannes) is woefully behind on her processing targets; purgatory here seems to be set in a business park on the outskirts of Milton Keynes.

While Mark (Gerard Miller) sorts out the photocopier the recently deceased duo spark up an easy friendship. With luck, they hope, they might end up being sent to the same other-worldly destination. But even in the afterlife things are never that simple. It soon transpires Freya is not quite as dead as she appears to be.

There is more than a hint of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 film masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death in Cunningham’s Curating. The twist here is that Freya, unlike the movie protagonist, really has no desire to live again. Her unfortunate encounter with the bus may well not be the accident it first appears. Will she agree to give up the companionship she has found with dishy-but-decent John to return to a life that, in some respects, is not worth living?

Curating offers a dose of gentle comedy that has something valuable to say about the imperative of grabbing life’s opportunities while we can. Unlike Freya, none of us will get the offer of a second bite of the apple. Unfortunately, the play has had its own metaphorical encounter with a rampaging bus. What has gone missing from the piece is a final act, more specifically any meaningful resolution of the central relationship between the two protagonists. Perhaps Cunningham is trying to make a point that death rarely offers up the chance of a neat ending to our existence; everyone exits life with loose ends pending. Fair enough, but drama is not life. You may end up leaving Curating feeling the final third of the play has gone AWOL.

Writer: Helen Cunningham

Director: Nikoletta Soumelidis