Notes from the author:

The Dead Move Fast, or Cell G159 as it's also known, began as far back as 1996. I'd just had my first play produced and I began toying with the idea of a mystery thriller with a philosophical bent. The notion of smuggling ideas into a form or genre that doesn't usually concern itself with them appealed to me. So to make a piece of art that looked on the surface like a piece of entertainment but that had within it some ideas – was the task. Not long out of University and doing a bit of teaching drama, the ingredients for the play began to evolve. I watched lots of old black and white films. Bits of them rather than the whole way through – but enough to immerse myself in the feel and tone of the English B movie – whatever that means. Low budget I guess.  I'd been under the spell of theatre and in particular the romance of commercial theatre – I'd been reading autobiographies of Emlyn Williams whose Night Must Fall intrigued as did another thriller – Wait until Dark and then perhaps most of all the works of Patrick Hamilton Rope and Gaslight. I'd also been reading a lot of short stories many of which I'd adapted into short plays to help my drama students. I was for my own pleasure dipping in and out of the books and the films of Edgar Allen Poe and so one way or another at the that time – for many reasons – I was immersed in the genre.

The genre was so dated really that I didn't have to try very hard to make it funny. Just taking it seriously was comic enough – although the odd joke arose here and there but seamlessly – there was no way I was going to crowbar any in and the play wouldn't be judged on how many laughs it had in it. The play would succeed or otherwise on its own terms. The tension and the mystery and the suspense are what would hold the audience. Worth noting that I was also very into Hitchcock films at that time and wrote a (not particularly good) dissertation on his films in my final year at Bristol University.  Added to this was an interest in absurd theatre – and also philosophical plays – usually French Sartre or Italian Pirandello. But the questioning tone of the concept play was also found in, say, N.F. Simpson "The Hole" or in a different way in John Guare "Six degrees of Separation".

So there really was the blueprint for the play – the theme was very much helped by the fact that I'd just read cover to cover Oliver Sacks book "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat stand" and the condition Korsakov's is a real condition mentioned in that book and the notion of an empty person who has to continually reinvent himself to make sense of the world around him appealed to me greatly for it's metaphorical value. So that was the genesis of the play. But what appeals to me now is that I had a very strong image when I was writing it that this was the sort of play – or it aped the sort of play that would have some sort of life in the West End or somewhere akin and then a further life in draughty old reps up and down the country. It would crop up in drama festivals held not just in schools or arts centres but also performed by intrepid theatre companies whose theatrical homes are in old Scottish Abbeys or converted Windmills or makeshift barns... Careful what you wish for!

Production