Rest in Peace

Photo: Jiri Sediak

= It’s impossible not to love street theatre! Certainly not when it’s this good! The Priden Mozic Theatre Company (Slovenia) has given us a trio of street performers and 40 minutes of laughter in a silly sketch called Rest in Peace. The premise has something to do with undertakers with a direct phone line to God, who calls repeatedly to announce their assignments. The performers, clothed in their funerary blacks, get a volunteer from the audience to lie in the coffin - and be resurrected of course. And there’s a surprise at the end (hint: it involves water). 

Is this simplistic theater? What could be more profound - or more necessary - than laughing at death? Rest in Peace is as defiant as The Day of the Dead, and it wraps up in 40 minutes.

Moreover, street theater doesn’t let the audience lose itself in a fiction, as does realistic theater. We perceive the men on the street as archetypical undertakers and as Slovenian performers simultaneously. It’s a subtle cerebral work-out. Comedy has always done this: presenting the unacceptable by distancing it.

Rest in Peace is as frivolous and serious as it could be! I couldn’t have liked it more! Thank you, Priden Mozic!

 review
Steve Capra
September 2019
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