Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Pauline Davies, Faye Caddick, Paul Codman, James O’Brien.

To honour the past is one thing, to find yourself unexpectedly in the back garden of time, spade in hand and ready with the synaptic electricity burning ready to resuscitate it so you can bring it back to life to examine it in greater detail, so you can relive the pain and the grief of all that you lost, all that was once loved. Such moments should be left to stay hidden and yet as we face the uncertain end and all we have is time, it is into that garden we go and the shovel and the spade dig eagerly.

Paul Burns’ definitive piece regarding black comedy, DNR (Do Not Resurrect), is to expose the wound of the darkness wrapped around the beauty of life as the memories become all powerful and bleed into the present day, the regrets and the surreal moments of laughter, is highlighted with observational honesty and the sadness of what we perhaps might all expect when we feel that the end might be close at hand.

Who it is that is trying to take our life away is up for debate, the more romantic might suggest that fate is inevitable, that our crowded memories as we lay awake trying to remember the banal of information, the Prime Ministers who have been in office whilst we have lived, counting backwards in German from 20 down to 1, the names and places of the times that didn’t fit, all is enabling the brain to finally accept that it is not Death come to ease our passage but the ghosts of all that we didn’t understand or follow through on which paves the way.

For Ken Fraser, spending his final days in a home, suspicious of his family, sure in his own mind that someone is going to kill him and unable to let go of the past, the religion of his mother, and the details, always the bleeding of memories in which the present is infiltrated by those ghosts, is one taken with philosophical intent and the expected fear in equal measure. It is in this that Paul Codman as Ken lights up the stage and one that really captures the mood of Paul Burns’ writing and Rowan Dyer’s powerful directing.

At the end should we embrace the idea of digging up the past, or should we just let it go, ignore the casual conversations with the dead and buried, keep one step ahead of those surrounding us with affected good thoughts; in the end it is probably a finer way to live to suggest that some issues should be left to stay still, to pay heed to the words of will, to see the new life brought to the theatre of time.

Ian D. Hall