Oedipal Complex

Performance trio, post (comprising Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose and Zoe Coombs Marr), have made a name for themselves tackling big issues in often fickle and always funny ways on stage. Who's The Best? investigated contemporary vanity, Everything I Know About The Global Financial Crisis In One Hour delivered in glorious and chaotic fashion exactly what the title proposed, and their latest work, Oedipus Schmoedipus, takes on life's great leveller, death, and its representation in the Western theatrical canon.

Still within the first few years of parenthood, Rose won't be performing in the show, though has been a part of the devising process for Oedipus Schmoedipus and even suggests her entry to motherhood may have played a role in the shape the show took. It certainly left its mark on her own investigation of death.

“Having a young child, you know, you give birth and that's life, to think also about your own death in regards to having a child is quite intense. I suppose as a teenager you just think you're invincible, and then as you get older you do know you're going to die. But once you give birth, then it's pretty crazy to think, 'Well, one day I won't be in this person's life'. Zoe and Mish were in the delivery with me, so I don't know if this is maybe where it stemmed from, this idea of death.”

It also stemmed from an offer by Belvoir to take on a classic play – an offer less than enticing for the off-kilter theatre makers. “We were approached [by Belvoir] to do a classic play, but that's something that post don't do; we're not actors, we don't really love doing classic plays, we've always devised our own work. So we thought: how can we do a classic play without doing one? And that was by using about 300 plays and their deaths and turning that into a mega show,” says Rose.

Lifting liberally from Aeschylus to Wilde and everything in between, post made a big database and inserted all the sections that mentioned death before restructuring them to make a new show, to make a new text. “All these plays are seen as the great plays. The greats wrote them; they all have universal themes that we all understand. We thought what is the most universal thing that we all will experience, because we don't all love seagulls, and we're not all going to go to Moscow, but,” Rose pauses, delivers flatly, “we will all die. Even though you may not think on a daily basis, I'm going to die, for that moment that we're all together in this room, in this theatre, and when we get out of this show we're all going to be 75 minutes closer to death. That's a fact.”

Before you get scared off, remember there is no greater antidote to tragedy than comedy, and post have proven themselves adept at manufacturing a laugh or two.