A Matter of Life and Death – a delightful adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's all-time classic

The Guardian

06-04-2025

The 1940s hits, played by on- and offstage bands, cross-fades to cacophony. English bomber pilot Peter is suspended above us. His plane is hit, his parachute in shreds; only his radio still functions. He connects with American ground staff radio operator June (standing before us on the in-the-round stage). During a snatched, crazily bantering exchange before Peter bales out, the two fall in love. Kaylah Copeland and Thomas Dennis, as the couple, calibrate this crucial, tone-setting scene to perfection, delivering an emotional punch with a light touch and grounding fantasy in emotional reality.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 film, A Matter of Life and Death, was made with serious intent, as a propaganda piece, to heal divisions in the aftermath of the second world war. It brings the dead of past conflicts into contact with the living via a seemingly whimsical romance – and a seemingly endless, celestial staircase, here magically conjured to our imaginations through the interplay of Alexandra Stafford's lighting and Laura McEwen's designs.
Peter survives and meets June; their love blossoms. It's a mistake! A thick fog hid Peter from the 'conductor' sent to guide him to the afterlife (Michael Hugo's French aristocrat walking gingerly as if still conscious of the effect of the guillotine that ended his life during the French Revolution). How will the bureaucracy of the world beyond manage this once-in-a-thousand-years error?
A trial is convened. This world and the other overlap. While the white-clad dead debate whether Peter must join his fellow airmen or remain with June on earth, white-clad medics operate on the airman's brain. As in the film, this delightful new stage adaptation by Theresa Heskins, who also directs, plays with ambiguities within the fiction: are we meant to see the other world as 'real' or as a product of Peter's injured brain?
A joyous, 14-strong ensemble of actor-musician-dancers tops and tails scenes with life-affirming, period swing jazz rhythms (under Akintayo Akinbode's musical direction), conveying, more powerfully than the film, the message that 'nothing is stronger than love'.
A Matter of Life and Death is at the New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 19 April