For its 21st birthday, Young and Hungry is celebrating with three short plays. They are all comedies with tragic undertones and they will appeal to their target audience. Each play, however, needs cutting by 10 minutes. The plays cover the positives and the negatives of social media, the comedy and tragedy of intense self-reflection, and the grieving young coming to terms with death.

Death is the subject of Helen Vivienne Fletcher’s farce How to Catch a Grim Reaper, directed by David Lawrence. With its student flat setting and traditional farce structure,

With its student flat setting and traditional farce structure, the play depicts the capture of a Grim Reaper by an amateur film maker, a med student and a psychology major. [More]

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It’s a while since we saw a play at Bats Theatre set in a student flat. But Helen Vivienne Fletcher’s very well crafted How to Catch a Grim Reaper is not about flat politics. Nor are the characters slackers. They are very focused, for various reasons, on the titular objective. Nevertheless it’s a passing concern about the bond the gets the biggest laugh.

Director David Lawrence has aligned his excellent cast and crew to ensure their quest plays out with dynamic energy in Nina Price’s realistic set, lit by Aisha Atherton and augmented by Sarah Burton’s sound design. Jessica Bukholt-Payne completes the design team with her perfectly appropriate costumes.

Tobias (Andrew Clark), an honours student and tutor in Psychology, has a plan to trap The Grim Reaper. And for strong personal reasons, first year Psych student Josh (Hamish Boyle) has volunteered to be the ‘near death’ bait – thanks to the expertise of medical student Robbie (James Calverley).

It is set up to happen at the flat Toby (sorry, he hates that: Tobias) lives in along with Hamish’s lawyer sister Mel (Erin Hurley), who holds the lease and is safely heading overseas … except her flight is cancelled. Yes, it’s a dark and stormy night. And the best laid plans inevitably encounter complications.

Stacy (Isabella Woods) is a film student and grabbing the opportunity to digitally record it all, on a small hand-held and a camera on a tripod which feeds into Mel’s large flat screen. Intriguingly the camera sees what the human eye does not – and something very clever has been done to create that illusion (AV by Keegan Bragg).

Pursuit of the quest challenges, reveals and ultimately changes the characters and their relationships. The play also embodies an intriguing enquiry into Grim Reaperology itself which in turn touches the nerve of the ‘assisted dying’ debate. Rachel (Emma-Yvonne Simons) and Spencer (Brodie Taurima) give good accounts of the hooded ones.

The quality of production in every respect makes it a pleasure to suspend disbelief and engage intellectually, emotionally and even spiritually with How to Catch a Grim Reaper – summed up by Lawrence as “an existential horror-comedy-thriller-drama-romance disguised as a play set in a student flat”.

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