Dorfman, London
Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film about dead souls living out eternal memories is charmingly done
The last year has been one awful thing after another. It’s a relief, then, to spend some time thinking of the very best of times. In Jack Thorne’s After Life, adapted from the award-winning 1998 film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the newly deceased get to pick the one memory they would like to live out for eternity.
Bunny Christie’s set design lines the back wall of the Dorfman from top to toe with filing cabinets. In this co-production with Headlong, the afterlife is not heaven or hell, but a retro, greyscale office. Over the course of the evening, we see a week of work in this bureaucratic limbo, as the dead (the “guided”) worry over which memory to pick, while the official team (the “guides”) work out how best to recreate them.
