Yellow raincoats, oversize glasses, woolly hats and torches… do they sound a familiar bunch? Ah, but you didn’t know that Gherkin, Flora and Brian come to collect people before they die. Like the hapless 30 year-old David (Viktor Lukawski), who spends some of the show on a vertical deathbed.
At its best, Death and Gardening by Wet Picnic is very funny. The ‘celestial tour guides’ take David on a whistlestop tour, morphing into his loved ones and using every trick (leather, lectures, trips and whips) to take him away.
Perhaps the strongest scene is when he reaches ‘admin’, an undefined limbo where you have to fill in a form (name, shoe size, belief in reincarnation, etcetera). Graeme Cockburn is in his element as a secretarial gatekeeper with just a touch of Kenneth Williams. He even puts David on hold, listening to The Girl from Ipanema, when they’re standing only a couple of feet away from each other.
The soundtrack is unapologetically 1980s. It lends itself to gutsy routines, such as to The Final Countdown, and tongue-in-cheek references (Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight), though stopping short of Doctor and the Medics’ Spirit in the Sky. There’s also some more filler-type music – unidentified piano and violins.
Generally, the physical theatre is stylish, but the words sometimes underwhelming. A starry sequence of torches is subtly coordinated, and Judy Barrington-Smuts, Charlotte Dubery and Jessica Hinds add some oomph as blatant madames. But the text drifts into sentimentality and a ‘death puppet’ never seems to be anything more than a purple rag and some sort of ping-pong ball.
The ‘other’ dimension is usually more intriguing than the ‘real-life’ hospital scenes, although the line is not always that clear. A simple but surreal design allows a garden to fold out of the hospital bed, with no.14 Bentwood chairs hanging in the wings.
Death and Gardening flirts with cliché, but bites back. The cast is talented, the execution has panache and the show is still in development, with many of the collaborators having fingers in an impressive number of theatrical pies. Perhaps it could go further beyond its comfort zone, but the humour and movement are already sharp.