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Like Boccaccio's Florentines fleeing the plague in The Decameron and Chaucer's pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, Rana Dasgupta's characters pass the time by telling stories. The tales that emerge from the hyper-modern non-place of the transit lounge span continents and subvert the boundaries between magic and reality, past and present. A plane bound for Tokyo is forced to make an unscheduled landing "in the Middle of Nowhere", a place "like a back corridor between two worlds". And what caused the row leading to that homicide - could it have anything to do with the chance finding of yet another cadaver? And could this last stiff be someone whom we have already met, and whose story will return to bookend the proceedings as the play leaves this innocent on the brink of being taken out for a treat that will conclude in her butchering?The piece that Breathing Corpses most reminds me of is Schnitzler's La Ronde: there's the same sense of knock-on effect and of very different types of people becoming tied together in a kind of chain. It's now premiered with a crack cast in Anna Mackmin's funny and expertly unnerving production at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. The sick, sad twist is that Jim, the dead middle-aged man whom Amy happens upon, has, it emerges, taken his own life because of the terrible psychological fall-out of having discovered the corpse of a murdered young woman, which had been left in a unit at the self-storage centre that he ran. That, though, is the fate of Amy, the 19-year-old Northern girl played by Laura Elphinstone, whose slightly farcical second run-in with a suicidal stiff forms the first scene of Breathing Corpses, a highly intriguing new play by Laura Wade. Not good for public relations to employ a cleaner with a seeming genius for finding customers who are certainly about to leave through express check-out. To chance upon a second begins to look career-endangering - particularly if your line of business is being a hotel chambermaid.
To happen on one corpse might be considered a misfortune. Yet it's a remarkably sympathetic portrayal in a production that is beautifully acted, perceptively directed and promises much for the future of Sheffield Theatres under West's directorship To Saturday (0114-249 6000); then touring to 9 April. And before he even enters the bedroom, Patrick O'Kane conveys the pent-up frustration of a husband unable to express himself. Behind that brilliant smile, Mary Stockley makes a vulnerable actress, conveying real pain at what she sees as her deficiencies as a woman. The senator's methods have a ring of horrible truth in Gerard Horan's nuanced performance, his brutality sickening in its plausibility.
Just as in Johnson's later Hitchcock Blonde, it's the female who suffers most, at the hands of men. And as the complexity of drama, tragic and comic moments, deft dialogue and neat twists and turns of fate are taking place on Tom Piper's bedroom set, the cat's miaow offstage even throws in an allusion (that Johnson added later) to Erwin Schr?ger's scientific theory.As the professor, Nicholas Le Prevost wears his learning lightly, his baffled air belying his genius. Add a dumb blonde who "demonstrates" with a toy trucks, a cardboard stooge and three balloons and, hey, we're in business."Knowledge is nothing without understanding," remarks Einstein, and, as Johnson is at pains to point out, it is not truth, but merely an agreement, while certainty is little more than illusion There are other issues, of course. A dark cloud of responsibility for his part in the creation of the atom bomb hangs over the professor; her inability to keep a pregnancy to full term threatens to unhinge the film star; while the ball-player can't hide behind a screen of ignorance forever.
