It’s why dying badly on stage has become one of the tropes of comedy theatre from the antics of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong to Spymonkey and Tim Crouch’s The Complete Deaths, in which all 74 stage deaths in Shakespeare’s plays are re-created.
The ancient Greek playwrights knew that it is absence, not an actor covered in fake blood, that makes us understand the permanence of death – and its horror. As Lars von Trier observed in The Kingdom: “Maybe what we’ve shown has troubled you. Don’t be afraid, keep your eyes and ears open. All we can do is try to scare you with stage blood. Only when you avert your eyes have we got you. The real horror lies behind the closed doors.”
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