On the evening of the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz's Liberation, it may seem in bad taste to savour an entertainment poking fun at our attitudes to death and the dying business. Yet Complicite's revival of its deliciously amusing, 21-year-old entertainment, A Minute Too Late, should cause no offence to mourners.
In mime and grave words, in quicksilver moves from slapstick to spectacular acrobatics, in light satire and lighter flights of lunacy, not to mention a touch of drag, the show invites us to observe how the culture of death and dying leaves us wreathed in embarrassment and all at spiritual sea.
The subtitle - "A civic comedy of municipal mourning" - emphasises Complicite's interest in gentle social observation rather than vicious mockery: a funereal journey of discovery begins and ends in a cemetery, by way of post-interment tea-party, church, register office and hospital.
The show speaks seductively to a semi-godless society for whom religion has lost its salience. Accordingly, the cemetery scene, as arranged by designer Tom Pye with James Humphrey, is of a childlike wasteland, with tiny headstones, a little heap of earth and pebbles.
Here, where Jozef Houben's mourning, semi-female figure sports a handbag and woman's head-wear, Simon McBurney arrives in spectacles, a fluster and a half-length coat. He is caught up in a brilliantly mimed sequence of contortion and confusion that for a few moments makes it seem a fresh corpse lies in the cemetery's midst.
McBurney's panic - "Help, someone's died" - inspires an amusing tussle over the protocols for dealing with sudden death. This dispute typifies A Minute Too Late's comic, sometimes farcical, interest in people desperately struggling to keep up the proper appearances in sight of death.
Funeral tea-party politesse goes wildly wrong. While Marcello Magni bows down to God and smiles up to Him in church, McBurney, in the depths of religious confusion and doubt, always remains at least one kneeling step behind. A registrar who loses his cool and his seat together with a fast-driving undertaker amusingly represent flawed, official faces of the death industry.
McBurney, grappling first with doctors' prevarications and then with the booklet "What to do after a death in England and Wales," makes, in his own beautifully composed production, a fine, black comedy out of our mortality blues.
Until 26 February. Information: 020 7452 3000.
A Minute Too Late
