Well, we’re not afraid of you! [cheers] To this home-grown enemy, to the faceless and so-called ‘cultural’ terrorists, this “Front”, these Turquoise militants, I say…up yours!! The scene opens with a hotel room and a corpse. The Burton Taylor Studio's intimate stage allows Amy to come into the room and apologise for disturbing the audience before it becomes clear she has discovered yet another body. She proceeds to talk to the body of Jim for some time, interspersing humour (“not surprised you didn’t touch the shortbread”), realism (“why wouldn’t you do this at the Ritz instead of a dump like this”) and poignancy (“do you miss the sky?”). There is always a simmering sense of danger in David Ferry’s production. Amy the chambermaid who discovers the corpse covered in bed in the first scene has a quiet talk to herself, but you are just waiting for some surprise to happen. Gather round, ladies! Here are some powerful and passionate monologues for women in the latter half of their lives (arguably, the best half!) These monologues are all from theatre, if you’re after a film monologue, you can head here, or a monologue from TV, head here. Enjoy!

Verdict: Breathing Corpses is a unique experience for an audience member and the whole team must be applauded for their collaboration on this dark, multi-faceted, exciting production. Oh, yes – it’s the end of days! But who exactly is complaining? The Chinese are investing in cloud seeding. Saudi Arabia is making a fortune out of drought-resistant crop technology. They’re growing food in dustbowls, and they’re making trillions in the process! If this is the apocalypse, I say bring it on! [Cheers] Wade is also true to her fellow young writers, preferring to take in some new writing of an evening rather than something that’s been about for a bit. Shakespeare is “quite long” she says. “I like to have some time left to go to the pub and discuss the play. I already know Shakespeare’s brilliant!” How would that very short conversation about the Bard go Miss Wade? “Masterpiece, wasn’t it? Pint?” The last scene is also troublesome. Without giving too much away I will say that, although we are made to empathise with and understand the previous events that take place in the play, this last one comes across as a lazy way to end. A character is introduced supposedly to wrap the whole thing up, but because he is stereotypical and one-dimensional, he ends up doing nothing of the sort. This character stands out like a sore thumb, perhaps because the others are so well-crafted.There are five scenes in the play and through subtle, intricate writing some of the characters discover bodies and are haunted by it; some become the bodies themselves and perhaps in one case might be responsible for a body or two. The stories seem separate, but they are not. The beauty of Breathing Corpses is trying to solve the various mysteries as to who is under the covers and dead and who is not.

Certainly in 2005, with Breathing Corpses, Wade is obviously an elegant, muscular and fearless writer. The title comes from Sophocles of all people: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.” The same can be said of women too. This is a play of polarity. Reality jostles with fiction as the audience navigates the set, which is formed of “rooms” delimited by cardboard boxes. In the centre there is pile of these boxes, interspersed with television screens that light up in between scenes, giving the audience a context beyond the lives we are prying into. The dialogue itself is scattered with polar oppositions, and the banal sits next to the profound; the lines which will turn out to be crucial to the plot and the play are lost in everyday speech. This banality undercuts the unravelling of the lives of the characters: when workman Ray is told that his boss has inexplicably taken all the doors off the hinges in his house in a moving and pitiful manifestation of post-traumatic stress, Ray asks “Whadya use?” and is satisfied by the response that Jim used the screwdriver lying nearby. The audience however, astonished and bemused by this and injected with dramatic irony, could never be satisfied. Another polarity: the play forces the past and the future to oppose one another, an opposition which works in such a way that any attempt to understand the chronology will ultimately fail. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Gloria is a razor-sharp comic drama about ambition, office warfare and hierarchies, where the only thing that matters is selling out to the highest bidder. We are told both everything and nothing. We are given all the clues which, when followed, lead us nowhere: I left the Keble O’Reilly with a satisfying sense of dissatisfaction.Breathing Corpses is not a play about the living coping with death. It is hardly about the living but rather, as the title suggests, the half-dead: the characters had a close encounter with a cadaver, and their minds are dropsical with thoughts of death. Do they cope? Most people do, but not they. They collapse with singular ease under the weight, wreaking more death on the way. Why do they fail with such gusto? It is not explained — the play is not concerned with naturalistic minutiae. There is barely any character development. There are no motives. The portraits do not swell. The circular plot – the cunning of it – promises an antiseptic game, not a brooding tragedy, more card castle than gothic cathedral. Cleverness, at least the kind the audience would detect too readily, does not sit well with drama so intellectually, again, the play is a vacuum. No deep thoughts here. At no point does Laura Wade, the author, commit herself to ideas or convictions. She fights shy of didacticism. Faced with death, she seems to tell us, there is nothing to say. It is ‘surreal’, as one character puts it. Everything’s dying, apparently. The weather – the planet as we know it. Apparently even Capitalism itself is dying! [Laughter.] Please! You wish! [Applause.]

The Children also has two monologues for the other female character in the play, Hazel. Hazel is a retired mother of four; she practices yoga, she’s super-organised, and is the epitome of domestic efficiency. She lives on a farm with her husband, and has led an environmentally responsible life that she feels now warrants being a little selfish. Her monologue, early in the play, is about the decision she and Robin made to stay and fix up their property, and look after their animals, despite what she feels; that they had earnt the right to take the easier route just this one time. It begins “And then I had this amazing thought: we don’t have to. We don’t actually have to. To clear it up.” But Wade also points out that while both plays are suffused by death, they are actually about the art of living. Breathing Corpses takes its title from Sophocles' assertion: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."The rest of the cast, too, give exceptional performances (which, I repeat, would have better fitted other surroundings, but let’s forget about that plaint for now). Helena Wilson’s Kate mauls boyfriends and household dogs. She is a hysterical and sarcastic woman with a perennially pissed off face. She swears naturally. Her partner, Ben, is played by the director, Dominic Applewhite, and he carries off the violent shifts in register well, by turns meek and murderous. Isobel Jesper Jones jabbers wonderfully as Elaine, marshalling an impressive array of tones and facial expressions – an ideal raconteuse. She is credibly despondent in the darker scenes. James Watson, as Elaine’s husband, Jim, contributes two shrewd portrayals, first of a thin-lipped bureaucrat, then of the same man traumatised. His sense of control is unassailable: he does not waste a wink. Calam Lynch as Ray is simple without being a caricature. Cassian Bilton plays a bumbling charmer, who turns out a psychopath. His look of manic fixation strikes the right note; Hugh Grant with a bloodlust for raw pigs’ entrails. The smart people are thriving. The smart people see business opportunity in what’s happening to our planet. We have gathered here to solve the world’s problems, and we all know the solution is Fossil Fuels! [Loud cheers.]

This dark play about confronting death introduces us to an array of fascinating characters: Amy, a hotel-cleaner, Jim and Elaine, and Ben and Kate, whose lives are linked by a series of morbid revelations. Written by the up-and-coming writer of Posh, Breathing Corpses is both a literary and a theatrical delight. In Henrik Ibsen’s three-act drama about a widowed mother and the return of her prodigal son. In a monologue towards the end of act one, Helene Alving, forty-five, is revealing all the horrible things her husband did to her to the minister, Pastor Manders. When Pastor Manders suggests that by having ‘wayward ideas’ and denying her duties Helene had brought upon herself her dysfunctional relationship with her son, she decides that it is time to reveal the truth: the drinking, violence, and boastful infidelity of her husband created an environment so toxic for her son that she had no choice but to do what she did. The piece contains interjections by Manders that would have to be edited out, but with very few changes this would make a great monologue for a performer who is confident at playing with status, class and emotional vulnerability. Breathing Corpses is a play by British playwright, Laura Wade, about the discovery of two separate corpses, and the characters tied to the events. In scene four, Elaine is talking to her husband, Jim, who has been going through a tough time after discovering one of these dead bodies in a crate. She enters this scene to find; ‘Jim sits cross-legged on the floor, carefully removing the crews from a brass door handle. Beside him, underneath a camping groundsheet, is a pile of doors.” Jim can’t move past the idea that the moment he opened the crate he cemented the dead woman’s fate: “Maybe in that second when I opened the box, maybe – Like if I hadn’t, maybe she’d have turned up at home a few days later”. And so, in response, Jim has resolved to take all of the doors off their hinges. Elaine, whose patience has completely dried up, is in this monologue trying to get Jim to snap out of it. He’s already ruined Christmas, no one can get through to him, and she thinks enough time has passed for him to be returning to normal. With Breathing Corpses Wade wanted to explore the effect of discovering a body on the people who discovered it. The premise of the play is both intriguing and dangerous. She always has you on your toes trying to figure out how these characters are connected, because they are, and who is under the sheets in that bed as we file into the tiny theatre. There are clues in the text as to who it is.All this will be fitted in around actually seeing work performed, as Wade has not lost sight of why she started writing in the first place and why she moved east from Bristol to London: “There’s so much to see”, she says. “I go [to the theatre] three times a week and it is impossible to see everything, which is brilliant! If I don’t go at all during a week I feel rubbish. I don’t mean I feel guilty, I just feel funny in myself.” It is about people trying to live and deal with what life throws at them - the desperate fight for happiness," says Wade. "I've always been fascinated by those newspaper reports about people out walking the dog who discover a body in the bushes. For a short time they are at the heart of the story, and then what happened to the corpse becomes the focus and the person who found the body passes into obscurity. But they have to live every day with the knowledge of what they found. It's the idea that once you've lifted the lid and looked inside the box, what you've seen stays with you. You can't unsee what you have witnessed." I mean I feel like. I feel like you’re letting this get in the way when it really- It’s a bit. I’m a bit- the doors and the talking rubbish about fish in your eyes and- I’m sorry it happened but I won’t take responsibility and you shouldn’t because we had nothing to do with it and we’re not people that kill people and we’re not- I am interested in the way advances in medicine and palliative care mean more people now have the opportunity to plan their own deaths, and also plan for those who are left behind," says Wade. "What does that do to the grieving process? Grief needs to be occupied, and organising the funeral was one way of doing that. As Myra's husband says at one point, 'The funeral isn't for you, it's for us.' But if you know someone is going to die, what do you do with the time that is left? You can't just all sit around being sad, missing them before they are actually dead and buried." The scene changes to Jim’s story and how he discovered a body in one of his units. The quote from the play’s advert: “When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse ”is certainly bleak, and the character it most applies to is Jim. The unfolding story isn’t, however, so full of despair that it is depressing; more, it reminds us of human frailty and how easily happiness, or what passes for it, can be destroyed through a single moment.