What’s the story?

Freya wakes up on the floor of an unfamiliar office belonging to a friendly but strictly professional man, who won’t introduce himself beyond his being her Curator. She has a pounding headache, a gap in her memory since earlier that morning, and the growing dread that the paperwork this Curator is trying to bring to order may well be the sum of her time on earth.

After a stint behind the scenes directing the company’s increasingly successful Spent, 28&2 Productions’ Helen Cunningham takes centre-stage as writer and performer of Curating, an exploration of the funny behind the fear of dying, and the real real concern that admin and bureaucracy can and will follow you beyond the grave.

This review of Curating is written of my own volition, having paid to attend.

Where did it play?

Curating played four performances at London’s Old Red Lion Theatre.

Information about this run can be found on the company’s website, where information about past and future projects are also available.

Spoiler-Lite Thoughts

Curating is a difficult show not to spoil, at least to some small but significant degree. We could sidestep the early confirmation that, yes, Freya was in a disastrous accident and her Curator is helping to get her affairs in order before she passes on… but then any reference to the 19th century taxidermist who wanders in, or his own backlogged Curator, becomes more of a challenge. Sufficed to say, this mysterious office is one of an unknown number in which the employees are tasked with a workqueue of curatees to guide through their transition to whatever the next step is. Nothing, heaven or hell, reincarnation, they aren’t paid enough to know and certainly wouldn’t be allowed to tell any of us if they did.

Cunningham’s Freya quickly comes to a startling bit of understandable Karen-ing: she wants to speak to the manager. Someone is wrong here, a mistake has clearly been made, and she would like to speak to whoever is supervising this nameless young man. In a nice bit of comedy from Cunningham’s script, she is sternly told that she can’t speak to the boss… because he’s on annual leave. These touches, both comedic and commonplace, of everydayness create a delightful balance against the fantastical conceit, letting the writer move smoothly between the ordinary and existential in both her humour and her heartbreaks.

Director Nikoletta Soumelidis, writer and star of Spent, keeps things simple in this regard. The world of Curating is all business (or at least it’s intended to be) and so the performances and movement are human, controlled, for function rather than show, particularly from the Curator himself. Only in moments of extreme emotion and growing distress are striking tableaus called for, and even these are dictated carefully, keeping a human quality with some such scenes even seeming, in tone, not too dissimilar to real-life office drama, further establishing the admin-beyond-the-grave idea.

As the mysterious and oddly jovial Curator, Gwithian Evans carries himself with a sitcom-esque quality – to this otherworldly office worker, this is more an office comedy than it is the existential horror Freya is experiencing, and Evans’ grounded, frustratingly unconcerned characterisation makes this as humorous and it is astonishing. His co-worker Matilda, who has a more laid back approach to the job, is played by Andrea Matthea in a delightfully ditzy performance. The character may be one too many actually seen on stage, the 70 minutes gliding by smoothly but with little room spare for new ideas, but it’s still a shame that while we have the character she isn’t a bigger presence. Matilda seems somewhat extraneous to what the story needs to get across, but she’s a wonderful character to have nonetheless.

On the character front that leaves only taxidermist John and Freya herself. Trey Fletcher brings an easy charm to John, whose formality gives way to the revelation of just how out of sync the two Curators’ progress is, and who proves to be devastating as Cunningham reveals more about the character’s own life and hardships. His characterisation works nicely alongside Cunningham, who by his entrance has had time to establish her own presence onstage. As Freya, Cunningham must anchor the piece, allowing herself to access the whimsy of her script’s divergences into comedy while maintaining the underlying terror of her situation – fortunately, she is more than up the the task, turning in a thoughtful and active performance while allows us to get to know Freya without needing the admin to amount to a crash course in her life.

Don’t misunderstand, Curating isn’t a faultless production, but the show is certainly impressive. Maybe John could be a bit more true to his time, though I’m certainly no expert to suggest what that may or may not entail, and loathe though I am to say it, Matilda may prove down the line to be one thread too many to leave hanging. Still, nothing struck me as a major cause for concern, and all four performers brought such wonderful qualities to the stage that it was hard not to simply sit back and embrace the madness.

Like the inspirational posters surrounding the simple staging, every mystery has a plausible answer, but “just accept it” feels equally valid – are the posters of frogs because of an inside joke, a reference to ancient beliefs, simply because they’re the funniest visual option, a nod to Dead Like Me to balance out the Good Place vibe of the opening?

I don’t really know, and frankly I’m not sure that I need to. Maybe some questions, like what happens after we’ve passed, aren’t for the living to answer. When asked what wonders have come to be since John’s passing, Freya can think only of a Rubik’s Cube, and that metaphor eternal questioning and constant backtracking fits nicely in Curating‘s continuous questioning of what is next, and for that matter, what is now.

Rating and final thoughts

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Thoughtful. Frightening. Funny.

Proving themselves again as a small but strong company with a real passion for pushing interesting, thought-provoking stories, 28&2 Productions add a sharp touch of existentialism to their catalogue with Curating. With a free-flowing, at times surprisingly breezy script from Helen Cunningham, whose strong performance anchors the production alongside standout bookending from Gwithian Evans, this is a delightfully off-kilter hour and change I can’t wait to spend with these characters again. And above all else, this play about the finality of death and the comparative briefness of life carries a gentle current of optimism, and glimmers of wishfulness.