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The opening quote to Farah Najib’s drama tells us that “living well and dying well is a community affair”. What are the implications for a community when a woman lies dead in her home for more than a year without being discovered? All the signs are there, from the slowly seeping stench in the hallway to the maggots emerging in the homes of her neighbours.
Questions of responsibility and culpability, both individual and systemic, are raised in Najib’s play. Its central, sad scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound: the deceased, Shirley, is fictional but the play takes inspiration from the real, lonely deaths of several women listed at the beginning of the script, including Sheila Seleoane who lay dead for more than two years before she was discovered.
Three storytellers (Marcia Lecky, Sam Baker Jones and Safiyya Ingar) describe events leading up to Shirley’s discovery from the point of view of her neighbours – a single mother, a cleaner, a middle-aged widower and his grieving daughter among them. The drama underlines its artifice rather redundantly (we are actors, the actors tell us). But there is intimacy and richness in the stories they tell, with a deft creation of interior life even though the third-person narration should technically distance us.
In a production directed by Jess Barton, a spotlight is used to create focus and stillness (lighting design by Peter Small), backstories are folded into the present and humour is entwined into a story of death and desolation. Caitlin Mawhinney’s set design, with the beauty of dried flowers overhead even as we are told about maggots and skeletal remains, delivers in irony.
But there is a fuzziness in the play around bigger systemic failures that lack the forensic detail needed to devastate. The pushand pull between the human need to connect versus urban isolation is reminiscent of Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring and Kae Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos, but the play does not tie together the personal and political nearly half as rigorously. The central arc around the maggots appears to be building to a surrealist horror on insect invasion but stops short to serve as little more than backdrop.
It has an anticlimactic effect, as does the leavening of darkness with a benign tone of goodness and warmth. Najib has a knack for drawing you into her world, even if she pulls her punches in it.
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At Bush theatre, London, until 28 February
