It’s a well-worn assumption that a near-death experience puts the day-to-day business of existence into perspective. David Gilna’s new play, based on his own brush with the Grim Reaper, reiterates the cliché and manages, in its brief hour’s duration, to do little more.
Given a slightly crude bare-boards-and-black-leotards staging by Conal Kearney, it sees four young Irish students, among them Gilna’s alter ego Sean, whom the writer also plays, indulge in a hedonistic life of sex and partying – until Sean is struck by lightning and falls into a coma.
The subsequent soul-searching, and the bedside confessions of his friends, are mawkish and hackneyed, self-consciously served up with snatches of pop songs and poetry. What happened to the author was no doubt extraordinary; this play is anything but.