Death Suits You – VAULT Festival

Death Suits You at the Cavern, London as part of the VAULT Festival.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This quirky, dark musical morsel – an hour-long fringe piece – is the brainchild of its performer Sam Hooper, a graduate of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts, and fellow VCA co-writer/composer Robert Tripolino. Encompassing music, dance and rap-like beat poetry, it’s a one-man show with a live soundtrack, directed by Gabrielle Scawthorn in the reverberating Cavern of London’s vast VAULT space under Waterloo.

It’s the perfect, chilly setting, as the audience is invited to listen in as Death himself gives a lecture or TED Talk – DED Talk? – about his roles and responsibilities when it comes to dispatching the human race. He’s modest and self-deprecating, even a little coy at times, but he’s also fiercely proud of the effort that he puts into his (uncelebrated!) work and more than keen to tell us all about it.

Like our charming leading man, The Grim Reaper is no stranger to musicals. (Hooper’s credits include Cameron Mackintosh’s Oliver!, the premiere of King Kong and Cats.) Maury’s Yeston’s Death Takes a Holiday comes to mind, as does the Fixer from Joshua Schmidt’s wonderful Adding Machine). As with many modern personifications of Death, gone is the long black cloak and scythe, replaced by a clerk’s white collar shirt and some stationery. Here, the Grim Reaper is more of a hellish civil servant than an angel of death.

Hooper’s Death also has that American Psycho magnetism. He fully embodies the role, and up close here in the VAULT Cavern, you can enjoy every subtle tick, lip-purse and eye-roll of his performance. I could’ve happily sat through an hour of his lecture without the music, as his script is as keen as a freshly whetted scythe. (I went scything recently in Regent’s Park, and these things are surprisingly sharp!) You find yourself laughing at what should be really inappropriate things – suicides, murders, fatal accidents with items of stationery – and yet Death has an infectious passion for his work, so all is forgiven.

The songs kick in as the Reaper presents some of his favourite or most memorable dispatches. As he plucks the death certificates from a box file and pins them to a cork board, he recounts the subject’s usually tragic (or tragicomic) life story. There’s then a pivot as Hooper takes on the role of the deceased, expressing their feelings and playing out their actions, musically and physically.

Tripolino’s score, live from the keyboard, guitar, cajon and often – somehow! – all three at once, fits the tone of the show well. Ambient sounds echo around the vault-like Cavern, and the songs are intelligent and complex. In a fringe show like this, you might expect comedic patter songs or glitzy showtunes to counteract the serious tone of the script, but Hooper and Tripolino opt instead for a serious, introspective score in a variety of styles – a hymn, a rap, some beat-style poetry. A couple of tales are even expressed through dance, which works surprisingly well, most likely because – as with the songs – the choreography has a profound quality to it. Hooper switches seamlessly between the acting, singing and dancing, and is more than proficient in all disciplines.

So, yes, good material for an actor looking to showcase his abilities, but also an engrossing and amusing piece of theatre that toys with the form. There’s not a lot of narrative shape to it, but Hooper does attempt to give meaning to all the dying by echoing Hemingway’s observation that we all die twice – once at the hands of the Grim Reaper and again at the last time someone says our name. While we can’t escape the icy cold touch of the Reaper the first time around, he has no control over our second death, so what are we doing with our lives to ensure that we’re remembered? ‘In some ways men can be immortal,’ as Hemingway noted. You could consider Death Suits You to be Hooper and Tripolino’s own stab at immortality. Time will tell…

Craig Glenday