She (Unfortunately) Knows What She’s Talking About: Kirsty Mann’s Corpse
★★★★★
Kirsty Mann knows corpses better than most.
She’s seen her fair share. Legitimately, in hospital. Less legitimately, beneath the covers of her bed. And atrociously, scattered in a tin beneath the apple tree.
The opening premise is clear. Mann and her husband, Mark, both doctors, live in a tiny flat in London. It’s so tiny that any hopes of starting a family are somewhat complicated by the fact that a potential baby would be worryingly close to the oven.
But hope manifests on the property market, assuming the form of a three-bed Victorian semi in East London at a spectacularly low price. Here, finally, a future baby would be at least six feet away from the oven. Therefore, it’s perfect.
Except it’s NOT.
There are a fair few architectural and atmospheric warning signs ignored in favour of optimism: a crumbling ceiling, a spot of mold, a toilet that flushes on its own and disconcerting horizontal lines etched into the wood of the bedroom door. There might have been a reason for the slashed price.
The house is haunted, Mann realises, by none other than June, its previous inhabitant.
The horror of this paranormal revelation is only accentuated by Mark’s absence from the home. Now working with the dreaded Big Pharma on a project that Mann simply cannot articulate, despite how many times he’s told her, Mark leaves for three weeks, rendering her the quintessential female Gothic heroine: isolated in a haunted house.
Power cuts, slamming doors, lonely nights watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and a terrifying night shift at the hospital: Corpse encapsulates a whirlwind of scary stories without ever losing its hilarity.
What feels at first like an artful blend of escapist Gothic horror, genuine fright and comedic relief gradually reveals something more carefully constructed underneath. Little motifs circle back from beginning to end, while death hangs over the entire production. Mann explores the absurdities of encountering it as a doctor—someone accustomed to its realities—and as the victim of a haunted house, where she is decidedly less so.
This precision carries through to the production’s staging. For such a small stage, Mann transforms the space. Using only a bed, a lamp, an armchair and a scattering of props (including some dreadful paintings), the uncomplicated set is continually reinvented. Nothing feels out of bounds. Lighting and sound are similarly effective. A dimmer light or an eerily still piece of audio can tip the production almost imperceptibly from comedy into horror, making the show remarkably immersive.
Mann’s performance is equally transformative. The one-woman show introduces an impressive cast of characters, and Mann slips between them so effortlessly that sometimes you barely register the transition until an entirely different person appears in front of you.
Watching Corpse feels somehow like reading a Gothic novel, watching a Mike Flanagan miniseries and sitting in a theatre all at once: an isolated woman, a conspicuous house and the creeping uncertainty of whether what she sees can really be trusted. It taps into the tradition of the female Gothic without ever becoming weighed down by it. Because Corpse is really, really funny.
Mann lets an audience laugh comfortably before plunging them back into darkness and, on more than one occasion, making them jump. Crucially, the comedy never punctures the horror; the two make each other more effective. This show takes a deceptively simple ghost story and produces something tightly constructed, technically accomplished and immensely entertaining.
It seems Kirsty Mann may have struck gold, or, more appropriately, a tin buried beneath the apple tree.
Corpse is showing at Summerhall (apparently a venue already home to seven ghosts) at 3:15pm until 30 August.
Cover image via Jenny Forward-Hayter
Eilidh Paterson
