The rest of the cast, too, give exceptional performances (which, I repeat, would have better fitted other surroundings, but let’s forget about that plaint for now). Helena Wilson’s Kate mauls boyfriends and household dogs. She is a hysterical and sarcastic woman with a perennially pissed off face. She swears naturally. Her partner, Ben, is played by the director, Dominic Applewhite, and he carries off the violent shifts in register well, by turns meek and murderous. Isobel Jesper Jones jabbers wonderfully as Elaine, marshalling an impressive array of tones and facial expressions – an ideal raconteuse. She is credibly despondent in the darker scenes. James Watson, as Elaine’s husband, Jim, contributes two shrewd portrayals, first of a thin-lipped bureaucrat, then of the same man traumatised. His sense of control is unassailable: he does not waste a wink. Calam Lynch as Ray is simple without being a caricature. Cassian Bilton plays a bumbling charmer, who turns out a psychopath. His look of manic fixation strikes the right note; Hugh Grant with a bloodlust for raw pigs’ entrails. Gather round, ladies! Here are some powerful and passionate monologues for women in the latter half of their lives (arguably, the best half!) These monologues are all from theatre, if you’re after a film monologue, you can head here, or a monologue from TV, head here. Enjoy!

But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse." This will hardly be the only review to suggest that hot young playwright Laura Wade seems obsessed with death. Colder Than Here, which opened less than a month ago at Soho, dispassionately followed a dying woman's preparations for eternity. Breathing Corpses is an elusive tale that observes a gruesome cycle of linked deaths. The goings on will have you gripping your arm-rest trying to figure out where this is going and where it went. The playing space of the Coal Mine Theatre is and the audience is right there, almost in the middle of the action. The design team (Steve Lucas with his set and lighting and Ming Wong with the costumes) do wonders in creating the world of the play with economy. Comment. Breathing Corpses was written by Laura Wade, a British playwright. She began being produced in 1996. She wrote Breathing Corpses in 2005, about the middle of her career and many years before her explosive play, Posh, opened in London in 2010.The Production. The production is directed by David Ferry which means the production is elegant and fearless. Most of the scenes have an eerie quietness to them except one scene between a couple who are violent in their lovemaking until it turns dangerous. The smart people are thriving. The smart people see business opportunity in what’s happening to our planet. We have gathered here to solve the world’s problems, and we all know the solution is Fossil Fuels! [Loud cheers.] The scene opens with a hotel room and a corpse. The Burton Taylor Studio's intimate stage allows Amy to come into the room and apologise for disturbing the audience before it becomes clear she has discovered yet another body. She proceeds to talk to the body of Jim for some time, interspersing humour (“not surprised you didn’t touch the shortbread”), realism (“why wouldn’t you do this at the Ritz instead of a dump like this”) and poignancy (“do you miss the sky?”).

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen.There are actually those – the enemy within – who would have us live in permanent terror and apprehension about common sense solutions we are proposing. [laughter and applause. Vika approaches her.] Petroleum and coal are the energy sources our planet needs to see it through this time of flux! The timing is urgent. Breathing Corpses is a 2005 play by the British playwright Laura Wade which first premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. [1] Plot [ edit ] We are told both everything and nothing. We are given all the clues which, when followed, lead us nowhere: I left the Keble O’Reilly with a satisfying sense of dissatisfaction.

Last year was probably one of the finest in the life of young playwright Laura Wade; she achieved something many more experienced playwrights rarely do by having two new plays running simultaneously in London, Breathing Corpses at the Royal Court and Colder Than Here at Soho. This was all topped off by a Critics’ Circle Award and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. Matthew Amer caught up with one of theatre’s hottest properties just days before the Laurence Olivier Award ceremony. Certainly in 2005, with Breathing Corpses, Wade is obviously an elegant, muscular and fearless writer. The title comes from Sophocles of all people: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.” The same can be said of women too. The scene with Kate and her boyfriend, Ben, was excellently portrayed. It was easy to relate to the dialogue and her anger with her boyfriend’s seemingly endless passivity. It transpires that Kate, too, has found a body, but, rather than it traumatising her, it merely annoys her that she has to devote so much time to helping the police. The dialogue is particularly excellent in this scene. Breathing Corpses is a play by British playwright, Laura Wade, about the discovery of two separate corpses, and the characters tied to the events. In scene four, Elaine is talking to her husband, Jim, who has been going through a tough time after discovering one of these dead bodies in a crate. She enters this scene to find; ‘Jim sits cross-legged on the floor, carefully removing the crews from a brass door handle. Beside him, underneath a camping groundsheet, is a pile of doors.” Jim can’t move past the idea that the moment he opened the crate he cemented the dead woman’s fate: “Maybe in that second when I opened the box, maybe – Like if I hadn’t, maybe she’d have turned up at home a few days later”. And so, in response, Jim has resolved to take all of the doors off their hinges. Elaine, whose patience has completely dried up, is in this monologue trying to get Jim to snap out of it. He’s already ruined Christmas, no one can get through to him, and she thinks enough time has passed for him to be returning to normal. This dark play about confronting death introduces us to an array of fascinating characters: Amy, a hotel-cleaner, Jim and Elaine, and Ben and Kate, whose lives are linked by a series of morbid revelations. Written by the up-and-coming writer of Posh, Breathing Corpses is both a literary and a theatrical delight.Well, we’re not afraid of you! [cheers] To this home-grown enemy, to the faceless and so-called ‘cultural’ terrorists, this “Front”, these Turquoise militants, I say…up yours!! I don’t care about the business, if you don’t want it anymore, fine, we’ll sell it I don’t care. But you’ll have to do something else. You can’t just stay at home taking the place apart with a screwdriver. Kim Nelson plays Kate and Benjamin Sutherland plays her boyfriend Ben. Their lovemaking is rough and he has the bruises to prove it. She is tough, in control and goes too far. He is boyish and a bit aggressive and turns dangerous when he thinks she might have been mean to his dog. Finally Johnathan Sousa plays Charlie, a smooth-talking, charming guest in the hotel. He chats up Amy. Is he harmless? Is Amy? Director David Ferry always has us guessing. It is about people trying to live and deal with what life throws at them - the desperate fight for happiness," says Wade. "I've always been fascinated by those newspaper reports about people out walking the dog who discover a body in the bushes. For a short time they are at the heart of the story, and then what happened to the corpse becomes the focus and the person who found the body passes into obscurity. But they have to live every day with the knowledge of what they found. It's the idea that once you've lifted the lid and looked inside the box, what you've seen stays with you. You can't unsee what you have witnessed." The American premiere, produced by Luna Theater Company, at Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, Oct 2007 with the Chicago premiere being produced by Steep Theatre Jan 2008, directed by Robin Witt.