“Meeting up with a partner so soon after a breakup is an awkward time – and she’s dying.”
Your Funeral is the debut play of new company Pharaoh Productions. It takes inspiration solely from the song ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’ by Neutral Milk Hotel. The play is a one-act-long duologue between ex-partners Anna (Rebecca Harper) and Jeff (Matt Sheldon), in which the audience watches the last moments that the two will ever spend together. The cast’s chemistry was palpable, and their way of rehearsing seemed light-hearted. It was also clear that the actors were given license to take ownership of their characters.
The unconventional song-to-stage writing process began when Nick was working on the Critical Listening paper of his first-year Music exam. The task was to use music to create something else creative, and Nick took it as an opportunity to fulfil his long-term dream of writing a play. The end result was, in his words, “really emotionally raw, and really character-driven”.
It was easy to tell that the script took many hours of careful thinking: “initially, I knew I wanted to [turn the song into a script] and I wasn’t quite sure how I’d get there. I spent a lot of time listening to the song and considering different angles on how I’d do it… and then, out of somewhere, from the depths of that track, this story came out.”
This perhaps does not do justice to the emotional complexity that Your Funeral aims for. The script in its final form is about painful conversations and the things that we can’t say to people we once loved – it will appeal profoundly to anyone who has experienced a breakup that was “no one’s fault”. The frustration of the scenario is intensified by the context that it is Anna’s final goodbye to Jeff after a terminal leukaemia diagnosis. It captures the despair that each half of the former relationship reckons with as their lives change “irreversibly, completely, and very dramatically”, Nick explains. Upon completion of the play, Nick saw Jeff’s character as a “good guy”, but now finds that portraying him as calculated is “much more interesting”.
Prior to the events of the play, Anna embarks on a “pity tour”, as Nick calls it, of all of the people she would like to say goodbye to. The play focuses on one of these goodbyes, as she attempts to regain the control that the diagnosis removed from her. Moments between Anna and Jeff become extremely awkward, as Jeff is still bringing up the sudden way in which Anna broke up with him, but understands that he must put this aside in their final moments together. This desire to “be a good friend” creates a painful tension onstage, Nick tells me.
It undoubtedly takes work to connect to the characters, given the emotional depth of the material. Matt reflects on Jeff’s emotional journey: “after a breakup… it’s a whole package of emotions, they’re all horribly intertwined. In the play, we pluck at these threads one by one and get a whole range of responses.”.
Meanwhile, Rebecca connects to the character using what she called Anna’s “levels of façade” – presumably, how honest with her emotions Anna is being in each moment. Despite the script’s challenges, Nick stresses the ease with which they adapted to the material. I was intrigued to know why the actors were so keen to be involved in the project. Rebecca mentioned her past acting experience in comedic roles: “I’ve played, among other people, Napoleon,” she joked. This project represented a new challenge which she was excited to throw herself into. She was so enthusiastic about Nick’s writing that she auditioned for both characters.
Her comedic experience turned out to lend itself well to playing Anna: the audience can expect moments of humour amongst the sombre dialogue. Anna is determined, Rebecca says, to make everything funny, in contrast to the earnestness with which Jeff approaches her death.
Given the complexity of the relationship Nick has created, perhaps songs should be used more often as creative starting points. Nick mentioned that he was glad that the track was there to help him as he developed the narrative, a kind of creative backbone to come back to when making decisions about the play’s tone or pace. For Matt, music has also been a way of connecting to characters: he explained that he has created a playlist for every single character he’s ever played – but ironically, ‘In an Aeroplane Over the Sea’ alone was enough to place him in the mindset of Jeff.
While its premise is emotionally bleak, Your Funeral carries elements that a student audience will relate to. Matt mentions that Jeff is the character most like him that he’s ever played, “a uni finalist, living a relatively normal, non-fantastical life”. It is heavily naturalistic, and Nick stresses that “the characters react how you’d expect them to react” – there are awkward pauses so long that the audience will feel discomfited.
Their interactions are unplanned, imperfect, and reflective of the frustration that accompanies any relationship ending. Rehearsals are drawing to a close and all they need now, Nick says, is the sofa.
Your Funeral is on at the Burton Taylor Studio, 21st-25th October.
