[Review] "When You Pass Over My Tomb"
★★☆☆☆ An intriguing small-scale play about desire and death unfortunately found DOA.
Unfortunately, “When You Pass Over My Tomb” is one of those plays that no friend of mine was willing to accompany me to. Beg and bribe as I tried, it’s hard to convince your average person to come see a play about “desire, friendship, and eroticism” with content warnings for “assisted suicide, mentions of necrophilia, mental health and blasphemous language, [and] descriptions of mass disasters.”. Though of course, as a fervent lover of the Intersection of Love and Violence, a full-time Romantic and occasional discipline of Batailles, I was immediately intrigued. I had to go see it.
“When You Pass Over My Tomb” is a play written by Sergio Blame, translated and adapted from Spanish by Daniel Goldman, put on at the intimate Arcola Theatre in London (Dalston Junction). Its synopsis is as follows:
“[…] a darkly comic meditation on how we live and how we die; the story of a writer who makes the incredible decision to give his body another life after death.
“I remember thinking, what difference is there between donating my body to science and donating it to someone who might find pleasure in it when I’m dead.”
Desire, friendship, and eroticism intertwine in this dazzling new play that asks how far would you go for love? And will the world allow it?”
Synopsis from the Arcola Theatre website

Oh, to unravel the puzzling structure of this play. For starters, all the actors are presented as “dead” ghosts of themselves (their real selves) that have wandered to put on this play, and we are told about each of their individual demise with a sort of cartoonish glee, occasionally punctuated by sorrow. Then, another layer gets added, roles are shuffled around and assigned. Allel Nedjari takes the role of Sergio, the original playwright. Charlie MacGechan takes on Khaled, the necrophiliac of the hour, and Danny Scheinmann plays Doctor Godwin of the Assisted Suicide Center at which Sergio aims to end his life. These events are all presented as true, except for when the play frequently breaks the fourth wall so that the “Sergio” character, ie. Nedjari, can actively write the story as it’s unfolding. Or when characters refer to themselves in the third person. It’s a complicated web of story structures: a eulogy for the actors and for “Sergio”, as well as self-described autofiction (a mixture between autobiography, and fiction).
This genre choice means that, essentially, WYPOMT is a play that is writing itself as you watch it unfold, the writer’s pen never far out of view, the performance always just out of grasp, the audience disconnected and kept at arm’s length. It’s like watching a play through someone else’s memories of it. Messy, dissociative, tangled.
WYPOMT feels like a play that is laughing at its own audience, mocking them for their interest in its supposed own subject matter. All the purely beautiful scenes don’t linger long. When there’s a genuine moment, a heartfelt sentiment expressed without the play’s own heavy handed turn of phrase- moments where Sergio genuinely connects with Khaled, where he expresses a sort of tender yearning, a flash of true Romanticism- are immediately cut short in favour of more grotesque jokes or quick quips that rarely land. All things favourable for a pure black comedy, but undesirable for what presents itself as a mix between serious provocative drama and darkly humorous think piece.
For the entirety of its 2 hour 10 minute runtime WYPOMT is a play obsessed with needless intertextual connection and meta-commentary, completely undercutting any supposed emotional content in the play. As a structured play, it is more infatuated with the act of combining mediums (song performance, quotes and images on tv screens, “found footage” style connected camerawork, etc.), and weaving references together, than with presenting a neatly packaged whole. In itself this should not be an issue, as there are plenty of works that like to play fast and loose with their structure and their story’s “rough edges”, but for that to work the fundamentals need to be done well— as the play itself literally has Doctor Godwin remind Sergio of. Instead, whenever the dialogue mentioned Frankenstein, or Romeo and Juliet, I found myself longing so strongly to be at a production of those works instead.
Iconography is another thing dragging WYPOMT down: bullfighting, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati, Mary Shelley, superman, sharks and shark attacks, femurs, big athleisure brands, and Coca Cola, all make continued appearances— as if the play tells us all its metaphors outright, palm up, “Here, take a look!”. It’s almost collage, this patchwork of references, alterations and real-time callbacks. Some of this is conscious, to remind us of the author’s manipulations, his embellishments and his lies. Like a scene where Khaled and Sergio meet at a park, and Sergio alters the memory in real time to have Khaled eat an apple instead of a fig, both for practical and symbolic reasons, as he tells us in depth. At times, it seems the play will swerve to imitate and emulate its Frankenstein inspiration into a story about a misguided playwright in love with his own machinations, but then shies away yet again.

For what it’s worth, the three actors all put on fine performances within the messy framework they have to somehow make work. Each and every one has their moment to shine. Nedjari especially nails the sort of self-important manner of a writer longing to infuse his work with every bit of him. His Sergio is egocentric, self-imposed, smug, and that works well within the majority of the text, though occasionally overstaying its welcome in the more gentle moments.
As a work about “desire, friendship, and eroticism” WYPOMT has very little new or original to say, in spite of its occasionally Romantic stance on necrophilia. It’s a rather spineless way to play the game, always wincing at its own seriousness, always scared of being truly inflammatory, scared of being laughed at. So it laughs first. It jokes first. Isn’t this crazy? Isn’t this insane? Laugh with me, please, instead of laughing at me.


But why is this play, and the larger cultural context it presents, so scared of melodrama? Is it because we fear being laughed at, do we fear being “cringe”? Is it simply because it is hard to defend something taboo, something unmentionable, with full-bodied conviction? When I said I would rather be watching Romeo and Juliet or Frankenstein, it is wholly because those plays commit. They are not afraid to be silly, occasionally subtle and then heavy-handed. They are not afraid to be real. Conviction in play-writing is not a narrative life-sentence. Texts, and writers, are allowed to change their mind. What is important is that they don’t flinch away from its own chosen subject matter.
“Complex” is not necessarily a word that comes to mind regarding WYPOMT. Sure, the play is complex in the sense that it is complicated. Challenging, sure. But it is not necessarily thought-provoking. It talks at you for about two hours, and then it ends, but ironically enough, unlike the ghosts of its “dead” actors, WYPOMT doesn’t linger, nor haunt. A shame, really.
“When you pass over my tomb” is playing at the Arcola Theatre, London, until March 2nd. You can book tickets here.
Sabrina Angelina is dedicated to the intersection of love and violence, a term she coined to describe classical Romanticism's tendency to pair passion and suffering, tragedy and pleasure, together. Consumed by this concept, she writes on Substack and curates a White Lily Society Instagram page dedicated to arts and culture. In September 2020, she released her debut poetry collection “a Cult of Butterflies”- a pandemic project about longing, nostalgia, and her teenage self’s very first steps in poetry.
White Lily Society links // Sabrina Angelina links
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