The Full Works (Key Workers Cycle)

Josh Elliott’s clever The Full Works: the Funeral Directors’ Play was more concentrated. Here an experienced funeral director (Jason Barnett) instructs his apprentice grandson (Chima Akpa, a promising member of one of the Almeida’s two youth groups) in preparing a body for burial. Bill Milner plays the attention-loving corpse whose responses, whether humorous or poignant, to their ministrations — from shaving to dressing — are only audible to us. Elliott’s neat, witty text could conceivably have, and deserves, a life beyond Emily Ling Williams’s deft initial staging.

Josh Elliott’s The Full Works: The Funeral Directors’ Play is a fantastically weird, funny, macabre piece, tremendously acted by Chima Akpa, Jason Barnett and Bill Milner. It involves a personable corpse who lets us into his thoughts as he receives a close shave in the funeral parlour. There is wonderful direction by Emily Ling Williams.