The title says it all. Paul Jepson and Tony Parker's "reportage" play is based entirely on the words of convicted murderers. The six (excellent) actors sit or stand almost completely in one place and tell their stories in interweaving monologues.
They are sad stories of desperately sad lives. You sit in the dark listening to their pain, bluster and self-deceptions in the silences between the sentences, and the casual way that their lives headed for certain catastrophe - the sheer bloody waste of it all. You leave the theatre and nothing has changed. On the way home I think about the victims, the glaring absence of their voices.
The National's Transformations season is gathering pace. It is an experiment in form, so it is right and proper that it includes plays that eschew the traditional. But there are things about Life After Life that make me uneasy, beyond the fact that it has no particular claim to the theatre and would work better on the radio.
Reportage form is a particularly treacherous theatrical form. There is a danger that even with the best of intentions you just end up cashing in on human misery. Anna Devere Smith's plays work (both theatrically and morally) because she offers a selective but fully-fledged picture of particular events. The bits come together like a jigsaw. Out of Joint's recent foray into reportage was of interest because it had context, pairing Andrea Dunbar's 1981 autobiographical teenage play Rita, Sue and Bob Too about life and sex on a Yorkshire housing estate with a piece of verbatim theatre that charted what has happened there over the past 20 years. Art and real life were completely entwined.
Life After Life offers no bigger picture and no context. It simply offers up the words of the murderers. Are these completely verbatim or have they been edited in the way a journalist selects and tidies quotes in an interview? I think we should know.
And what is the purpose of the whole thing? To educate? To enlighten? To make us feel thankful that our lives are not like their lives? Life After Life is the theatrical equivalent of gawping at a car crash.
Until June 8. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
