How to Urn a Living answers the question ‘what if Six Feet Under were a sitcom’ at Camden Fringe 2024 at the Hen & Chickens Theatre
“We can’t make more people die…”
You know its Camden Fringe time when the people who are asking ‘what if Six Feet Under was a sitcom’ get their moment in the sun. In this case it is Beserk Theatre who are staging their answer to that question – How to Urn a Living – at the Hen & Chickens as part of the first week of Camden Fringe 2024. A strange and spiky hour, its madcap antics take place at Fowler’s Funerals, where a downturn in business threatens to put a nail in their own coffin.
Black comedy can’t really get much more mordant than a funeral parlour but there is something clever about writer Zofia Zerphy’s tonal use of comedy here that the pun in the title is possibly something of a disservice to. The overbearing weight of grief that accompanies death is still an all-too-real thing but finding the laughter in fleeting moments is how we get through it, thus Zerphy’s focus here feels part of that, a way to lighten that processing of death.
So we get Mr Fowler’s (Tobias Ross Reymond) fussing over the finer details of customer service, his cousin and resident mortician Wisteria (Zerphy) rarely constrained by her morgue and salesperson Lilith (Fiona Lotara) trying to drag the business into the 21st century. And as they deal with the wide range of customers that pop through the door (all played by Yolanda Matji), something of a plan begins to emerge in how they might be able to secure their survival.
Director Vilde Bjørkedal has fun with an aesthetic situated somewhere between Grand Guignol, camp knowingness and all-out farce. Montages are soundtracked to the likes of ‘Live and Let Die’, the headstones in the shop have neat sight gags, and the rat-a-tat-tat of Matji’s quick-changing customers offers up some often hilarious moments of some seriously madcap antics for this entertaining group of characters.
