Cadaver Synod, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Poster by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.
Cadaver Synod (Stage 31, Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking for comedy, I turn first to ecclesiastical history.
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
The premise of Cadaver Synod, a new satire by the up-and-comer playwright Sebastian Ley (638 Ways To Kill Castro), is just too outrageous, too absurd, not to be on loan from reality. Who could make up the bizarre events of 897 AD, when a vengeful pope, in cahoots with the Holy Roman Emperor, digs up the corpse of a predecessor pope, dead for seven months — and puts the rotting cadaver on trial? Lordy, what they get up at the Vatican!
Along with the lowly provincial sub-deacon who’s conscripted to be the legal counsel for the defence and “speak” for the deceased, they are all characters pried from this amazingly wacky historical canvas, in a dark comedy that doesn’t rule out magic.
With the possible exception of the corpse of Pope Formosus (the jury’s out on that), they get the breath of life in Ley’s breezy, amusing contemporary dialogue, from the three ace comic actors in Kathleen Weiss’s striking production. It’s an intricate piece of theatrical contruction, for one thing an unusual coming-of-age story, with its sweet own dance number, set in an age of mind-bending political complications.
The script imagines a thwarted schoolboy relationship between Stephen VI (Michael Watt) and the career-challenged Jacob (Samuel Bronson), whose career in Catholicism has been stalled indefinitely. The agile Watt is very funny as a fresh-faced, blithely hapless pope who occasionally worries he might be evil, and hasn’t quite figured out his new gig (“I don’t like foot-kissing; it makes me feel weird”). Bronson plays it straight, which has big comic pay-offs, as Stephen’s estranged friend Jacob, perplexed by the job he’s landed speaking for the cadaver, scrambling to brush up his crappy Latin. “I’m NOT having a sleepover with the Pope,” he says turning down Stephen’s offer to spend the night.
And as the suave, self-serving Emperor Lambert, Stephen’s mentor and the comedy’s éminence grise, a dab hand at intrigue, perjury, bribery, and assorted other corruptions, David Ley is a riot, always clutching a goblet of possibly holy wine.
All good unwholesome fun behind the scenes at the Vatican.
