Your Funeral is Pharaoh Productions’ debut play written by Nick Samuel, about the last conversation that ex-partners Anna (Rebecca Harper) and Jeff (Matt Sheldon) have after Anna’s terminal leukaemia diagnosis. The production carried both humour and strong emotional performances, and while both characters were frustrating to watch at times, this added up to a convincing portrayal of the complexity of grief.
Both actors gave stellar performances. Rebecca Harper lent Anna a vibrant incandescence that showed fractures in moments of self-doubt, leading to an eventual complete breakdown. Parts of the script where Anna’s illness became obvious (such as a moment where she is wracked by a coughing fit) were performed sensitively. Equally talented was Matt Sheldon’s interpretation of Jeff, a character both awkward and calculating. Sheldon’s portrayal gave the sense that Jeff had thought painstakingly about what to say to Anna, and was deeply frustrated by her refusal to take his thoughts seriously.
The most impressive aspect of Nick Samuel’s writing was how much comedy was incorporated throughout. Anna’s control of the characters’ dynamic was established immediately with the remark “do you remember when you thought I broke your back during sex?”, prompting some characteristic awkward shuffling from Jeff. Anna’s sarcastic remarks, well handled by Rebecca Harper, visibly reinforced Jeff’s insecurities throughout the play. The dialogue that I was least convinced by, though, was the more philosophical sections –for example, Jeff asking Anna what she was most proud of in her life, and Anna stating the obvious that her life was very short. However, given the subject matter of the play, I had expected more of that kind of introspection and was pleasantly surprised at the ability of the script to hold moments that were both extremely funny and emotionally intense.
The initial dialogue rendered Jeff deeply unlikeable, with a startling ability to make Anna’s death all about him. Sitting next to Anna on the sofa, he unashamedly began a sentence “when my dog died…”, provoking exasperated laughter from the audience. This turned into a long monologue about the way in which he grieved his dog, as some sort of blueprint for how he would like to grieve Anna, to which Anna said nothing and stared determinedly forward. This became a repetitive and effective dynamic: one of the actors telling a long story to prove a twisted point. It made the audience realise that Jeff was not acknowledging how important it was to Anna that she appear to him “completely fine”.
At the start of the play, it was hard to understand why Jeff kept pushing Anna to admit that her own death scared her. When Anna was choosing to make light of the situation with jokes, his demand that she changed her emotions to reflect his own made him seem insensitive;it was as if he was seeking a perverse legitimation of his own grief. The initial dialogue was at times slightly repetitive due to this unsatisfying dynamic.
A key shift in how I viewed the characters was when Anna persuaded Jeff to have sex with her, only for him to pause before unzipping his fly, one of the only clear-minded things he said or did. It was the first window into how vulnerable Anna felt, which would be built on in later moments, such as in a tearful confession in which she admitted that she thought that if they had sex, he wouldn’t leave her. In this moment in particular, Harper’s acting shone. The shock of the intense onstage intimacy seemed to mark a point at which all of their interactions became more toxic and emotionally intense.
These outbursts of toxicity were where the play was at its best. The actors were skilled at retaining humour as the dialogue became more combative. The jokes themselves, while still funny, became more wounding: outraged by something Jeff said, Anna refers back to her unsuccessful attempt to make him sleep with her: “I wasn’t wet. I lied”. Jeff reacts manically to the words Anna used to order him to do something, suggesting he never loved her and, most disturbingly, that he will laugh knowing she’s on her deathbed. This damaged the audience’s opinion of him irreversibly.
I questioned whether the script could have included more moments of tenderness between the two – but this seems impossible given the self-centred premise of Jeff’s character. Sheldon’s portrayal of Jeff gave the impression that he needed control of Anna: of her funeral, her memories of their relationship, and even her last moments. In a line so self-centred as to come across as bizarre, Jeff claims that real love means wanting someone next to you on your deathbed, and the fact that Anna denied him that by breaking up with him shows that she never really loved him. Many of Jeff’s lines are the epitome of missing the point: it’s because Anna loves him that she doesn’t want him there. However, it’s worth acknowledging that the play portrays the irrationality of grief, and Jeff’s character is used convincingly to take this to its extreme.
Jeff’s need for control was embodied in the way that ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’, the song that the script is based on, entered the dialogue. It seemed to represent another example of Jeff’s insecure attempts to assert his relevancy to Anna’s life, telling her that the line about “Anna’s ghost” refers to her. It was only on reflection that I realised how many of the song’s lyrics tied to moments in the play. For instance, “let me hold it close and keep it here with me” seems to refer to Jeff’s intent to remember their time together in a way that suits him. The childlike vulnerability of the need to keep Anna with him is shown onstage in moments such as that when he bleats “hold me”, and waits for Anna to come into his arms.
More perhaps could have been done with the set design, as the bareness of the stage meant that the actors were often standing up in intimate moments, which felt a bit unrealistic in the circumstances. At points, however, I thought the bare lighting and lack of elaborate stage design aided the painful awkwardness of moments such as Jeff’s refusal to have sex with Anna: in the bright lit, bare surroundings, there was nowhere to hide, reinforcing the bleakness of their failure to connect.
I left the production wishing the audience had seen more honesty from Anna’s character. Her ‘façade’ never fell away in a way that allowed her and Jeff to connect satisfactorily. This I think was intentional, showing the ability of the self-righteous emotions that we carry to obstruct vulnerability.
