Alfrun Rose’s Dead Air
She lies on the cold stone floor as though she were dead, though her foot twitches to the beat of the uplifting seventies soul she listens to, Alfie caught in a nether realm where she is not quite here and not quite gone, like her father, Thor, who died three years before yet who she cannot bring herself to let go, his memories and likeness held on AiR, “Britain’s leading Artificial Intelligence Resurrection service.”
The costs punitive, the penalty of failing to maintain her subscription the deletion of her last direct to interact with her father, she has been using her boyfriend’s credit card without his knowledge, seeking comfort, answers and forgiveness from a simulation whose parameters she can tweak to try and get the experience closer to the man she knew whom she never visited in the hospital as he lay dying.
A dark comedy of the digital afterlife and those left behind written and performed by the brilliant Alfrun Rose and directed by Anna Maria Tomasdottir, Dead Air is about unprocessed grief and the different ways people look on death, Alfie’s mother choosing to believe her late husband visits her in her garden in the form of a robin while finding comfort in Thor’s best friend while Alfie throws herself into virtuality reality seeking a closure which can only come from within rather than the endorsement of an algorithm.
With nothing to lose, the dead might find it easier to forgive the foolishness and mistakes of the living, but advertised with the motto “love shouldn’t fade with time” there is a timer ticking down the minutes of what can be said, Alfie begging for one more minute with a corporation which plugs upgrades between bouts of tasteless hold music, the nonsense of mother’s new age friends equally worthless in practical terms but at least well intended rather than a means to exploit the bereaved.
Alfrun Rose’s Dead Air has concluded its run at the Bunker at Pleasance Courtyard
