Opening Night of the Living Dead

Some Fringe productions exhilarate and excite you, some make you cringe and want to avoid theatre in the future altogether and then there are those that sit exactly in the middle. They don’t excite, they don’t disappoint, they just are! Opening Night of the Living Dead is the epitemy of this type of production.
Set during an amateur production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the play tells the story of our main two actors, their director and the lighting technicians. All is a fairly standard evening performance; one technician is bored of the production with an obvious dislike for actors as a breed while the other younger technician is in love with Juliet, not realising that he has competition in the form of the show’s director, and is trying to decide how best to engage her in a more social situation while our two lead actors are squabling backstage over whom has the best idea to improve the plays dynamics and motivation… A deadly virus in unleashed and our cast slowely sucumbs turning into flesh eating zombies, yet those unaffected must discover how to continue and finish the play.
There are some genuinely funny moments for example when the first chase scene between the zombie and our cast occurs but the repetition of this dynamic at a later stage in the play feels contrived and ultimately undermines the comic value of its first appearance. The cast convey themselves well utilising the limited space expertly but even in the small venue they do not project and at points struggle to be heard and understood fully. Overall this is a fairly light and inoffensive comedy that is enjoyable to watch.

3/5

Chris Kidd