Book – How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found
Author – Fin Kennedy
Year – 2007
Genre – Play
Pages – 108
I rarely mention book publishers here on my Book Challenge blog, but I think I am going to make a little exception for Nick Hern Books. I don’t have a lot to say about them, except they make some cracking theatre books, and the layout and actual books themselves are always brilliantly easy to use. If you like theatre, and like reading, and like to combine the two, then they are worth looking out for.
The unnecessarily long title of How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found comes from the title of an American book about how to get rid of your current identity and start a completely new life. Fin Kennedy used this – along with some alarming statistics about the rate of people that go missing in the UK – to form the basis of this play.
Written for five actors, playing around thirty odd parts, the play tells the story of a man who is having a bit of a breakdown. We follow his thought processes far more than we follow his actions, and not everything makes sense at first, but through some clever techniques, we find out exactly what has happened to him.
The plot is great, and I ate it up as quickly as I could. The play also leaves a lot of scope to do things, and should appeal to those directors who like to play around with what happens on stage. It is also great to read – a complaint about reading plays is that you often lose a lot in the reading instead of the watching – making this a good play to add to your database of plays – should there be anyone else out there attempting to do such a thing.
A good book, worth reading. And if you hear of any productions taking place, be sure to let me know.
9/10