Seen at Edinburgh Festival Fringe on the 15^th of August 2023

3 stars – intense narrative

Rachel is very much used to manipulating dead bodies. She’s been in the job for a while. Make them look as if they had just fallen asleep, disguising Death before the family sees the body. One day, though, it is different. The body of a man by whom she had been spelled at the sparkle in his eyes… yet her memory of him is not a positive one.

Alexandra Donnachie is the writer and performer of this one-hour long monologue. The text is beautifully written and has a powerful way of gradually guiding the spectator into the story. The performance is effective, yet I felt that I would have enjoyed more energy in the voice, more tension in the movements, and maybe a more diverse range of actions.

In Andy Routledge’s direction, the use of space is very simple and the only prop seems to be the actress’s polo neck top… and the actress’s own body. When Rachel speaks about the procedures she acts on corpses, the performer uses her own body, and especially her face, to show the audience how every passage is done. These moments are the strongest of the performance, when her body suddenly, from being a ‘social’ body, and a body to look at with the aesthetic distance of the performing dimension, turns into flesh, assimilated in the speech with the cold flesh of a dead person, and is manipulated like an insensitive object, that one has to reheat with one’s hands in order to fight rigor mortis.

When We Died is an intense performance that speaks about rape and fear, other people’s judgement, truth and appearance. Finally, it speaks about the importance for a woman to speak up, no matter how hard that can be.

Tickets and Info: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/when-we-died

Company Website: https://www.carbontheatre.org.uk/whenwedied

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CarbonTheatre

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CarbonTheatre