Kevin Toolis

On Wednesday, the lying in state for His Holiness Pope Francis began, with tens of thousands of mourners filing past his open casket in St Peter’s Basilica. In death before us, Pope Francis is still preaching his last sermon to the faithful; et tu in Arcadia ego. Death is always with us. When did you last, or ever, see a corpse, never mind an illustrious corpse, a global figure, like Pope Francis? In England at least, it is becoming almost unheard of. The English don’t do death any longer. Or at least not visibly. The English Wake, sharing the company of the dead as our Victorian forebearers did, has withered away. The dead mostly now pass unseen and unwatched from hospital bed to crematorium.

‘The mullahs are moody,’ said Aisha, a female university student, explaining her daily nail varnish run in with the aging female crones who guard the entrance to Tehran’s University of Arts.  All female students had to pass through a daily ‘modesty’ check to reach their classes. But the line on what was acceptable – nail varnish colour, make-up, a tuft of exposed hair peaking beyond the compulsory scarf and hijab – varied daily on the whim of the mullahs fighting for power in Iran’s closed theocracy. Some days red nail varnish was okay and other days the same colour was forbidden and Aisha was barred from attending her classes.

At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, the new thing, the hot ticket, is being neurodiverse. Across comedy, stand up, magic and the spoken word it’s not so much Lady Macbeth as My Mental Health. Standing out in the chaos of the 3,000 plus shows of Edinburgh Fringe by being ‘different’ has always been the number one prerequisite for gathering any kind of audience. And this year it seems like show after show is doing that by focusing on the psychological compulsions of the performers themselves.

The Edinburgh Festival is finally over, but why was this year's event so obsessed with dying? Death is the new Black, at least according to the artists at the fringe where our mortality has been eviscerated, diced, disembowelled, deconstructed and fed back in a torrent of death shows to an army of avid theatre goers ever hungry, it seems, for new interpretations of our predictable demise. Death Suits You, When We Died, You are All Going to Die, The Last Show Before We Die, Hello Kitty Must Die, and the Dead Dad Show are just a few of the catchy morbid show titles proudly performed in defiance of the usual theatrical sales logic that death is a stinker.

You never forget your first corpse, do you? Cold, visceral, mute, lying there immune from the world and its cares. But, for many people in Britain, seeing a dead body has become a rare spectacle – something that many of us may never see at all. Given that we will all one day die, this aversion to death – a subject which most of us don't even like to talk about – is bizarre. In the Iliad, King Priam longs for the 'heart-comforting embrace of my dead son Hector in my arms', but the English way of death has become ever more removed from the corpse itself.