Theatre

Limbo

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 24 August, 2011 13:42

“Oh dear,” the little old lady says to Michael as she relentlessly knits a shapeless yellow thing out of an infinite pile of yarn. “You’re not taking this very well.” Michael has died of a heart attack in his pyjamas and has only just seen out the window his funeral in the garden. Actually, he seems to be taking it a little too well. The two ghosts, Agatha who died twenty years ago and wasn’t much bothered to be away from life, and Mikey, a stressed-out bottom-of-the-ladder employee at forty or fifty, chat about stuff. God is brought up, in a weak teleological argument about how there must be a god if stuff exists, and the attractiveness of sausages to cats. Catherine, Michael’s widow, is being chased by Michael’s best friend and his drunken letch of a boss. But little happens there, either. Limbo is a sort of Ghost for the middle-aged, but with knitting instead of pottery. Despite being about death, grief and freeing yourself from aspects of life that don’t contribute to being alive (i.e. ignoring loved ones to work, winding yourself and your heart into a corkscrew worrying about meaningless things) the play doesn’t scratch anything more than cliched surfaces.

Camden Fringe Festival page

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