EDINBURGH 2021: Review: KILL ME NOW, Summerhall Online

Presented by theatre company Dirty Protest and written by Rhiannon Boyle, Kill Me Now is a live piece of digital theatre in the form of a Zoom webinar. The show has been made brilliantly accessible with a shared screen BSL interpreter and captions. There is also a trigger warning at the beginning regarding mention of grief and death.

Welcome to Anna Morgan-Jones' webinar. She's trying to recruit buyers for her "end of life celebration" style franchise. As a grief guru, she explains to her audience that she knows how grief can affect people but that funerals don't have to be a sad affair. She promotes her business model as joyful events.

The performance is styled like the typical webinars everyone working from home has had to endure over the last year. Morgan-Jones clicks through slides showing a variety of caskets and urns and the unexpected 'fun' options available. Her performance is so convincing that I couldn't sense a shift at all between the technical explanation of how the Zoom software would work and the webinar itself. The audience can interact via a chat box to find out more about the franchise and this is a fun element to the show.

Kill Me Now is a dark comedy where we see Morgan-Jones' sunny demeanour gradually slip as it becomes clear she doesn't quite have the handle on grief that she claims to. The format of Zoom is perfect for this show and I thought the audience interaction was really well done.

Kill Me Now is a recurring online event at Summerhall.