dead on cue

 Written and performed by Mark Carey, Dead on Cue is a ghost story set in the dressing room of a London theatre where Sir Claude Mason is performing in Hamlet, the twist being we see two iterations, sixty five years apart. 

Stuck in the dressing room while Claude treads the boards,  are Bertie Tindall in the past and Hamish Fife in the present, minor character actors resentful of Claude Mason’s predominance in the play. Carey plays both Bernie and Hamish in two masterly monologues that deftly present each with such clearly delineated characters it’s at times easy to forget they are played by the same man.

Bertie is the Music Hall ham, full of bluster and mannered delivery, struggling in a world that no longer wants declaratory exposition from a larger than life performer. His role in the play is to set out the jigsaw pieces in such a way that it’s hard to discern the full picture. With the help of some cheeky practical effects and excellent sound design, a claustrophobic sense of unease builds throughout his bilious retelling of the road to misfortune. By the close of the first act he’s left the audience with more questions than answers, as is the way with such tales. The slow and steady pace of MR James comes to mind, or the tall tales from Inside No 9. The play demanded an attentiveness from the audience as subtle clues are teasingly offered up with a deliberate pace that requires patience and good faith that all will be revealed. 

After the interval, during which the set was artfully redressed, Bertie’s descendant is pouring over artefacts from the past, as Carey nicely underplays Hamish in sharp contrast to the bombast of Bertie. There’s an elegant precision to the way Carey’s text deftly starts to make sense of the jigsaw pieces of the first half, and an impish ingenuity to the way he misdirects the picture the audience thinks they are seeing. Artfully, Carey integrates the text of Hamlet into the narrative, which together with some impressive stage wizardry elevates the production to something more than a shaggy dog story, albeit one that remains a self-aware hoot for those of us that can’t resist a spooky tale with a satisfyingly twisted conclusion.