Grief, AI, And One (Very Funny) Dead Dad: Alfrun Rose Brings Modern Tragicomedy To Tjarnarbíó

When the legendary Gis Von Ice, band manager for Vök, Hatari and Lay Low, among others passed away in 2023, he began visiting his family members in their dreams. Everyone, it seems, except his daughter, Alfrun Rose. To which Alfrun had one response, “Bastard.”

Resurrecting dad

“I was really angry,” says Alfrun, who’s based in the U.K., speaking to me over a video call. “I’m quite a pragmatic person. Also, my dad didn’t believe in God. He didn’t believe in ghosts, or any of that bullshit — as he would call it — like dreams and stuff like that.”

“I imagined if I was sort of the worst version of myself in grief, how I would resurrect my very funny, dead dad.”

Alfrun was clearly pissed. “I was like, ‘Well, why is that?’ because it’s not real. It’s just somebody’s underlying wish to speak to him or whatever and they got it in a dream,” she says. “I thought, why am I not allowing myself to do that?”

“I thought I’d do a séance with him, and it would be really funny because he’d be really stubborn and not turn up, and I’d have to speak to loads of other people in my family,” she laughs, describing the starting idea for what has become Dead Air.

Then she watched what she calls a “heartbreaking” documentary about AI resurrection, and the joke took a darker turn.

“I imagined if I was sort of the worst version of myself in grief, how I would resurrect my very funny, dead dad,” Alfrun says.

Written and performed by Alfrun, Dead Air combines raw, relatable grief with the tech buzzword of the decade: AI. Alfrun plays every role: Alfie, a woman struggling with problems in her personal and work life, who has recently lost her dad; the chatbot version of the said dad, rendered through a lowered, autotuned voice; and the cold, evil tech company behind it. “It’s all a version of — it’s a what if, what if we did this play,” Alfrun explains.

Addressing the elephant in the room, the speed at which AI has seeped into every aspect of our lives and its especially bad reputation in the arts, Alfrun reassures, “There’s no AI in the show, and there was no AI used to write the show, apart from for research purposes. I did use AI to sort of see what it’s like.”

The Fringe grind

“Taking a solo show to Fringe costs about 20.000 GBP. You are competing with almost 4,000 other shows and last summer, also Oasis.”

After brewing the idea for the show in her mind for almost two years, all while dealing with the very real grief of her father, Alfrun applied for the Edinburgh Fringe. The problem was: she didn’t  have the show written — something she doesn’t recommend doing.

“It was a real learning curve, but thank God for that experience because Edinburgh Fringe is a crazy beast of a place,” she says, later adding, “Taking a solo show to Fringe costs about 20.000 GBP. You are competing with almost 4,000 other shows and last summer, also Oasis.”

Wearing multiple hats in the production of the show, and with the help of her former roommate and the show’s “midwife and doctor,” director and dramaturg Anna María Tómasdóttir, Alfrun not only managed to get into the Fringe (the process and challenges of which she now details on her Substack) but also performed 26 shows during the festival and earned a bunch of positive reviews, including a mention in The Guardian, which compares her to “a kind of female Hamlet.”

Alfrun Rose by Alda Valentina Rós

“People think that you just work for an hour, you just do the show, but there’s a lot of preparation — mental, physical — and then there are the other hats that you put on, like promoting your show, networking, and trying to be friends with everyone,” Alfrun says of the whole Fringe marathon. “After you’ve just talked about death for an hour, you kind of want to eat a doughnut and go to bed.”

More feelings than facts

Dead Air follows a daughter who keeps spending money on subscriptions to AiR, the AI resurrection company (yes, companies like this actually exist) just to keep talking to her dad.

Because of the subject matter, Alfrun was afraid the show wouldn’t be funny — the only way to make it funny was to make her dad funny.

With sharp writing and unexpected plot twists (like a freak vending machine accident), the show never slips into “poor Alfie, let me get a handkerchief” territory. Instead, you find yourself absorbed into a family tragedy that gradually turns into a family drama. One of the most gripping questions throughout is how much of the show is actually Alfrun’s own family story? According to her, there’s more emotional truth than factual accuracy.

Dead Air, Alfrun Rose by Jannica Honey

“There are seeds of autobiographical. Like, I did lose my dad,” Alfrun says with a forced smile. “He was very funny, but what’s more autobiographical about the show than the facts are the feelings. It’s a fictional story about a woman who’s lost her dad and is seeking him.”

“When we lose someone — it doesn’t have to be your mum or your dad — when you lose someone who’s really close to you… my dad was a really good friend of mine, not just my dad,” she continues, “I think you seek those people endlessly, especially when you’re in the throes of intense grief straight after.”

For Alfrun, writing Dead Air became a way to process that grief and move forward. She’s now working on publishing a limited-edition book, which will include the text of the play, a few essays, and a speech she delivered at her dad’s funeral, to thank those who helped fund the show. There are also plans to turn the show into a limited series. In the meantime, Alfrun is already working on her next play, Dream House, about the housing market and nationalism.

So what would her dad have thought if he could see the show? “My dad was just proud of me, whatever I did,” Alfrun says. “I think he’d probably be quite embarrassed for himself. At his funeral, all of the musicians that he worked with, and everybody, made a choir, and lots of people sang and talked about him, and we were joking that if he was there, he would be so embarrassed he’d be sitting across the road at the pub. He just wasn’t really a centre of attention kind of guy. He’d probably make some jokes about it.”

Dead Air is showing at Tjarnarbíó March 4 & 5, followed by a Q&A with Alfrun Rose and Anna María Tómasdóttir. Tickets are still available here. It’ll also be playing at Greenwich Theatre May 13-16 and CPH Stage May 28-31.

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