Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Combine Robert Farquhar’s original and incredible ability to make a play of side-splitting genius from even the smallest of things and Francis Tucker’s seemingly unnatural and comic god like precision to go from the humour to semi tragedy in the spilt of second and the result is the fantastic Di Is Dead.

Everyone knows where they were when they hear that significant events happen that can shake a nation’s thinking and a world belief. The day when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the moment when the first hammer struck a blow into the Berlin Wall, when John Lennon was taken, when Manchester City won the Premier League for the first time…or the morning when Princess Di died in a Paris subway in August 1997, all of these in some part or another resonate with the human emotion of grief and joy.

For one man, a Brit-pop left over from the days of Oasis, Blur and Pulp, too make the journey to London to witness the aftermath of the death has far more reaching consequences and stories than most in the days that led up to the funeral. The meltdown that gripped the country is viewed as a spectator, a man wanting to find the subject in which to base his novel around and for some reason gets swept along with the frenzy and complete insanity that went along side it. The hawkers selling tat, the genuine grief felt by people for someone they had never met and throughout it all trying to find the perfect ending.

For anybody who has ever caught Mr. Farquhar’s work before, to be in the presence of his subject, portrayed by the exceptional talent that resides like a playful and outrageous demon within the body of Francis Tucker, they will understand that the work demands attention, complete and utter undivided attention because to lose even a second of the frenzied narrative, over 11,000 words of minute observation, would be an utter and shameful crime against theatre. There are moments that touch an audience’s heart, make them quiver with eager anticipation at the next piece of the story and above all cheer for the anti-hero made good. Di Is Dead is theatre at its most intense, deliciously bold and extremely funny.

Ian D. Hall