Curating – 28&2 Productions / Old Red Lion Theatre, London

Curating asks us to consider what the choices we make (or don’t) will mean to us once time’s run out.

Curating

Do we have some sort of innate fear, in the modern age, that the afterlife will involve paperwork? It’s certainly an idea that comes up from time to time in film and theatre. In 2021 I saw After Life at the National Theatre, itself based on a 1998 Japanese film. In After Life, guides from different eras help the recently deceased to select a memory they will ‘live’ in forever. Today’s offering Curating, by 28&2 Productions, has curators tackling the paperwork generated by the recently deceased. We never quite get a firm handle on what the curating process ultimately means.

But rather than paperwork, perhaps the key to this framing are the possibilities it opens up for understanding what is important in life, what a life well lived looks like. I love a last minute redemption: look at my annual pilgrimages to see A Christmas Carol. But a redemption arc after death – surely that’s more about us as the audience than the characters? One would assume so.

Our main character for Curating is Freya (Helen Cunningham, also the writer of the piece). An artist who is a call center operator by day, there doesn’t seem to be much that excites her about life. Nonetheless it’s a shock when she awakens in an unknown room and meets her Curator (Gwithian Evans), who won’t tell her his name. Or much of anything, really. But when it transpires printers are as temperamental in the afterlife as the here and now, the Curator leaves an opening for John (Trey Fletcher) to wander in. And eventually John’s Curator Matilda (Andrea Matthea) to fetch him. From their different perspectives, more than a century apart, Freya and John share fragments of their lives. But will either of them be able to make use of the lessons they’re learning?

Overstretched, or Not Stretched Enough?

There was a strange tension, for me, in Curating. On the one hand it felt as if the idea had been stretched a little long to fit a desired running time. On the other hand, certain aspects of the play felt a little rushed, or underdeveloped. For instance, John, for a man from 1898, adjusted very quickly to conversation with a woman from 2025. Perhaps it’s that his language wasn’t that Victorian to begin with: I thought Curating could have done with a dash of the Victorian verisimilitude of British Touring Shakespeare’s Frankenstein, which I saw recently. Other themes, which I won’t get into to avoid spoilers, are also rather quickly wrapped up before they truly develop.

I think, before future runs, a bit of work with a dramaturg might help to tighten up the writing. Likewise the direction by Nikoletta Soumelidis (who wrote and acted in the last 28&2 production we saw) is going in the right direction, but needs a little more development.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy Curating. It’s a concept creatives keep returning to for a reason, and provides a deep seam of dark comedy to mine. Some of the performances were particularly good, notably Gwithian Evans whose Curator brings a lot of the play’s energy. And it did give me pause, as I headed home, to think about what a curator of my life would find. There’s just one more chance this evening to see Curating as part of its current run at the Old Red Lion Theatre, but I do hope it will be back.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

Curating on until 10 November 2025. More info and tickets here.