Breathing Corpses @ Victoria Baths, Manchester

Young Manchester-based company Fresh Loaf are the latest to take on Lauren Wade’s award-winning drama Breathing Corpses, set in the (very atmospheric) basement at Victoria Baths. The play’s events stretch out in a non-chronological order from the discovery of a body in a hotel room, and explore different human reactions to death.

Victoria Baths is an incredible venue (though permanently freezing cold at this time of the year), and the rough brick walls and dilapidated nature of the downstairs room make an appropriately bleak setting for the play’s somewhat morbid subject matter. The staging isn’t wildly imaginative – a bed and a desk and a few bits of furniture shift around between scenes – but the intimate nature of the small room means that all focus is on the characters themselves, rather than their surroundings.

Fresh Loaf stick pretty closely to the original script, which is told in a series of vaguely ordered scenes eventually coming to form a circular narrative. These scenes are quick and expressive: there’s a glimpse into Ben (Todd James) and Kate’s (Rebecca Parker-Smith) destructive relationship, storage unit security man Ray (Joe McKie) is trying to question his boss about a mysterious smell, and a disarming courtship between hotel guest Charlie (Joel Parry) and wide-eyed maid Amy (Laura Woodward). The characters are all interconnected – to say why and how would be giving away spoilers, but suffice to say the connections prove fatal more than once.

There are strong performances from all the actors involved, and Marcus Grant-Lipiński’s Jim and Elisha Mansuroglu’s Elaine give a particularly powerful representation of a couple being torn apart by trauma. In fact, it’s in the really tense and dramatic moments of the script that the cast are at their best: Parker-Smith and James’s fighting as Kate and Ben is an example of actors able to act out drama and tension without losing the naturalistic touch of the dialogue and characters. On the other hand, while they seem comfortable with powerful and raw emotions, the company could have done with teasing out more of the black humour laced through Wade’s script.

Overall, though, this is a tight and well-performed adaption of an intriguing script about human nature and the unseen connections that link seemingly unconnected events.