Death becomes her

Laura Wade's plays are riddled with corpses and coffins. And the UK's leading theatres can't get enough of them. By Lyn Gardner
Laura Wade
Box set ... Wade has acquired expert knowledge of coffins through her work

For two days this month, Laura Wade will enjoy a unique double. She will have her first and second plays running simultaneously at two of Britain's leading new-writing venues. As her debut, Colder Than Here, draws to a close at the Soho Theatre in London, her second, Breathing Corpses, will just begin its season at the Royal Court. "It is," says Wade, "a bit like having Christmas happen twice over."

Maybe a slightly depressing Christmas, given the plays' subject matter. Breathing Corpses is a veritable Pandora's box of accidentally discovered dead bodies. And Colder Than Here is the story of Myra, a dying woman who sets about planning her funeral with the same energy one might expend on organising the perfect wedding. Wade, it turns out, is something of an expert on coffins. "You don't have to have a traditional casket. If you want, you can have a coffin made out of cardboard or wicker or papier maché. There's one like a seed pod, or you could buy one that doubles as both a bookcase and a coffin. During your life, you stand it in your living room, and then after you die the books are taken out and your body put in their place and the whole thing buried. I think that's wonderful, don't you?"

At just 27, Wade has gone from the playwriting equivalent of 0 to 90 in what seems like seconds. She began writing full-time only a year ago. Having two premieres in one month is, she admits, exciting and scary, but at least it relieves her of the burden that faces all first-time playwrights: of following their debut with another corker. In fact, Wade has already delivered her third play, a commission for Soho Theatre.

Soho and the Royal Court clearly believe they have a major new talent on their hands. Abigail Morris, Soho's artistic director, raves about the "precision" of Wade's writing. Anna Mackmin, who is directing Breathing Corpses, says it is rare to find a young playwright with such a refreshing approach to form (the play is an intriguing, slippery thriller, written, says Wade, as "a perfect circle"). "When you discover a writer like Laura," says Mackmin, "there is part of you that wants to shout it from the rooftops and part of you that wants to keep her a secret so the talent doesn't get spoiled. The nurturing of a new writer is such a delicate thing."

Wade, though, is taking the attention in her stride. She also looks robustly healthy for one whose work is so centred on death. "I really don't know where my interest in death comes from," she says. Her family, like herself, are all fighting fit. "Maybe I've just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven't had a hugely eventful life - maybe I'm compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I'm just a bit sick."

But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."

"It is about people trying to live and deal with what life throws at them - the desperate fight for happiness," says Wade. "I've always been fascinated by those newspaper reports about people out walking the dog who discover a body in the bushes. For a short time they are at the heart of the story, and then what happened to the corpse becomes the focus and the person who found the body passes into obscurity. But they have to live every day with the knowledge of what they found. It's the idea that once you've lifted the lid and looked inside the box, what you've seen stays with you. You can't unsee what you have witnessed."

If that sounds a little bleak, Colder Than Here is more darkly humorous in its depiction of the terminally ill Myra organising her funeral while her two grown-up daughters struggle to get their lives in order and her husband tries to get the boiler mended so his wife won't die in the cold.

"I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind," says Wade. "What does that do to the grieving process? Grief needs to be occupied, and organising the funeral was one way of doing that. As Myra's husband says at one point, 'The funeral isn't for you, it's for us.' But if you know someone is going to die, what do you do with the time that is left? You can't just all sit around being sad, missing them before they are actually dead and buried."

Wade's research for Colder Than Here brought her into contact with the natural death movement, which aims to rescue funerals from the conveyor-belt approach of high-street funeral directors and give people control over their own dead bodies. It's an approach Wade thinks we would do well to follow.

"The aim is to allow yourself to die and have a funeral in character. I like that, and I like the idea of trying to make friends with death. It is, after all, such a big part of our lives. But we barely acknowledge it." She smiles. "Maybe I can only say that because I've had so little experience of death. Maybe if I'd had more direct contact with death, I wouldn't find it so fascinating and I wouldn't write about it so much."

· Colder Than Here opens at Soho Theatre, London W1 (0870 429 6883), tomorrow. Breathing Corpses opens at the Royal Court, London SW7 (020-7565 5000), on February 24

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