Dead to Me

After, presumably, one particularly disappointing Christmas, Steven shows up at a medium's house, asking for a reading. He thinks it's all nonsense, but he's been given a voucher, you see. After a little pointless waffle, he leaves unconvinced. But the medium's cryptic warning ("You should speak to your father") rings in his ears.

A week later, his father is dead and Steven is convinced. Conversing with the dead is no sham, and moreover he's sure he has magical powers too. This is the tale of a grief-stricken non-believer suddenly grasping for something to hold on to, played for laughs but rarely succeeding. It's one-note joke, stretched out for the duration, is essentially: "those psychics are a bit dumb, aren't they?"

Given the show's running time is advertised as standing at one hour, when the show peters out after 45 minutes one can't help but suspect there's a whole scene missing here. Certainly the finale offers no interesting conclusion to the rather plain narrative scenes that preceed it. After all, this is a subject matter that has been turned over again and again in high-profile over the last few years. But here playwright Gary Kitching gets nowhere near the methodical analysis of Derren Brown's TV evisceration of Joe Power, nor the laugh-in-your-face confrontational skepticism of Robin Ince. Instead, this is a piece that seems not to know what it's saying; worse, it doesn't seem to have anything to say at all. Utterly forgettable, pointless stuff.