The Rest Is Silence

By Scott Bevan

If you could write your own eulogy, what would you say?

Dan has a way with words. He wants to be an actor but until he can make that happen, he acts in a different way. Dan is paid to deliver eulogies at funerals for strangers.

In what seems like just another job at first, Dan is hired by a terminally ill man, Bedford, who is determined to have some control in the future about what is said about his past.

But what is Bedford’s past?

“…will have you thinking about your own life and mortality long after you have left the theatre – bring your tissues!” Newcastle Live!

Dan somehow has to find not just the words, but the truth, to talk about a life not yet ended. A life that seems to be filled with lies and secrets.

At the same time, Dan is preparing for the role of a lifetime in a production of Hamlet, all the while trying to impress the director – on stage, and off.

Dan is about to learn that life is not a play, that words can mean so much and nothing at all, and how that line from Hamlet, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’, is easier said than done.

The Rest Is Silence is a psychological drama dressed in dark humour by Novocastrian writer Scott Bevan, as he ruminates on life and death, reality and pretence … and Shakespeare.

Creative billing:

DIRECTOR: Peter Ross

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Glendon Fletcher

CAST: Natacha Curnow

          Geoff Butler

          Andrew Sharp

          Caron Schumann

          Ben Simpson