Review: Looking Deadly

"Death is supposed to make us hopelessly polite... Not hopelessly crazy."

So speak a pair of funeral directors, penned and portrayed by Sligo's Niamh McGrath and Dublin's Keith Singleton, waiting to greet us in full costume just inside the doorway of The MAC's Upstairs Theatre at the beginning of their production of Looking Deadly. As we will find, they've just about summed up the play we're about to see.

Currently touring the island of Ireland, it arrives in Belfast with a reputation as "a play about death... full of life, and laughs". So much life and laughter, in fact, that sales have demanded a well-earned extra night at The MAC.

If you expect something along the lines of Father Ted, you expect correctly - contemporary irrelevancies and classic pop-culture references are seamlessly entwined with the mundane relevancies of and stereotypes around the central characters' careers, in much the same way Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' seminal comedy was most notable for.

But then, as I watch, I recall Linehan and Mathews' struggle with making a Christmas Special – Mathews once argued that, perhaps, Craggy Island was too mad and surreal to handle an hour of comedy. McGrath and Singleton have no such struggle. Like David Renwick, or an unsentimental Richard Curtis, their comedy is tight and brilliantly sustains mirth and merriment, to the point where an hour in their company is not quite enough. You sense they have many more caricatures in their locker.

The cover of the leaflet cum programme alone is parodical in the extreme, a sort of "honest" brochure for Foystown Parish. Among the numerous amusing notifications is an advert for the newly established Costless Coffins and their "RIP to high prices". They're a major thorn in the side of Lynch’s Funeral Directors, who are preparing for the service of the recently deceased Tom McCarthy as the play opens. And Jane (McGrath), who inherited Lynch's from her father, is burdened by agitation, frustration and pain. As is her mortician Rob (Singleton), but for different reasons.

Running counter to them are rival director Mick (McGrath again) and his son Seaneen (Singleton again). Both sets of characters are differentiated by lighting, posture and expression. With a centre-stage coffin essentially comprising the set, the entire play is dependent on accent, mime and mimicry. At this, McGrath and Singleton are adept, injecting movement and personality as they can muster into the busybodying and bullishness of control, and the helpfulness and helplessness of conscience, respectively, in addition to providing sideline "commentary" on events from a series of onlookers. Their performances, and Amy Conroy's swift direction, are quite a marvel.

More of a marvel, still, is the dark and thoughtful underbelly of the play, highlighted in McGrath's duelling directors. She plays them as the equivalent of two football managers - one subtly adapts for more lasting effect, the other doesn't. The customer, king? Don't you believe it. Be prepared to laugh and shudder at the lengths some will go to just to beat or eliminate competition in any business. In that way, Looking Deadly is reminiscent of the 1990s sitcom Home Improvement, where the quality of the job done is secondary to ego measurement and dysfunctional relationships. You might say it's less about the departed than what or how much can be gained from looking after the departed. For Jane and Mick, the conflict is intended to be internal, not external.

But, in their bid to take care of things, the directors and their associates look less and less like the kind of people you would want to work with the bereaved. In trying to look after the dead, the directors end up "looking deadly". Hence the title - and the almost relentless laughter in a play that pretty much amounts to improvisation at its finest. That's Looking Deadly for you... or should I say, Whose Coffin Is It Anyway?

Simon Fallaha

Looking Deadly ran at The Marketplace Theatre, Armagh on February 3, The MAC, Belfast from February 8-9 2017 and the Sean Hollywood Arts Centre in Newry on February 14.