‘The Strange Death of John Doe’ review

Taking its title from a 1940s folk song, Fiona Doyle’s new play ‘The Strange Death of John Doe’ looks at the perilous journey of an African migrant to the UK and his tragic fate.

Actors in face masks and scrubs greet the audience upon entering the theatre, cleaning our hands with antiseptic before we’re ushered into Michael Pavelka’s mortuary set, filled with gurneys, sinks and sterile lighting. The body the team of morticians is inspecting is a young black man: through a series of back-and-forth scenes, we discover he is called Ximo, a Mozambican who fled a febrile post-apartheid South African township to seek a new life in Berlin. But without the correct documents, he’s forced to take a hopelessly dangerous journey by land across two continents. 

This is a story of many moving parts – unfortunately, each of them suffers from being hackneyed and over-familiar. There’s the hard-drinking copper (Rhashan Stone) who’s been taken off a case, and whose procedural back-and-forth with his superior (Abigail Thaw) sounds like something we’ve heard a thousand times in ‘The Bill.’ There’s the rookie mortician (Callie Cooke, the best of the cast) and her seen-it-all-before supervisor (Charlotte Bradley), whose discussions about death and mortality are impossible to take seriously. Cooke appears again in the role of a battered Afrikaans wife, who’s sketched in too lightly to not come off as distasteful. But it’s not just credibility or sensitivity that’s the issue: the wealth of characters ask way too much of our emotional attention.

Luckily, each scene is stitched tightly into the next by Edward Hall’s able direction, with choreographic ideas developed by the late Scott Amblers. The way Benjamin Cawley’s Ximo is a static corpse in one scene, living and breathing in the next, then crawling for his very life, is very often effective. Doyle’s ambition is certainly to be commended, even if this never quite amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and doesn’t ring true enough to do proper justice to the plight of the modern migrant.