Dead in Here
Smock Alley Theatre – Black Box★★★★☆
Who remembers life before our current doomer era? When the twentysomethings of Dead in Here, a funkily sly work by playwright CN Smith and director Dominic O’Brien, are seen singing karaoke, someone looks back on the recent past as if it were already a separate, carefree age: “Let’s party like it’s 2019!”
In a wealthy English family’s estate, Millie (Allie O’Neill) cagily observes one of her Irish guests: Brian (Samuel Coyle), a brash partier who barely conceals his Anglophobia, and an obvious freeloader. “Maybe she’ll have us over someday,” ponders his girlfriend Georgia (Lora Hartin), about one of Millie’s other grand properties.
Inspired by The Decameron, the 14th century story collection where young people decamp to Florence during the Black Death, Smith’s group waits out a Covid-19 lockdown. Amid several echoes of calamities (it’s as if Smith and O’Brien are taking a temperature-check for Gen Z), it is Brian’s reluctance to move in with Georgia that the play seizes on; he cites an insurmountable housing crisis as an excuse. A working actor recruiting others into improvisations, he ends up acting out a fantasy that comes under Millie’s control, depicting a domestic life that turns disappointing and violent.
I was also reminded of Appropriate, Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play where inhabitants of a house discover clues of racist atrocities. Notably, a B-plot in Dead in Here concerning the house’s caretaker involves the casting of a different actor of the global majority in each performance.
Courageously, Smith’s playscript refuses to be explicitly about its world catastrophes, as if doing so risks narrowing its possibilities. Instead, we get an admirably shapeless dread of people inheriting irreconcilable crises. “Should I want to know how I’m going to die?” says someone, of a generation who can’t seem to push the question from their minds.
Continues today at Smock Alley Theatre – Black Box, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival