Writer: Edith Keays
Director: Ellie Jay Stevens
Edith Keays’ How You Died is an enthralling short play performed as part of FreshFest 2024 at the Old Red Lion Theatre. The central idea is that technology has allowed us to revisit a loved one once they’re dead. Or at least interact with an utterly convincing hologram of them. Think ABBA Voyage. But this technology comes at a cost. For a start, it’s an expensive business, not to be indulged in lightly. Then there are the intriguing questions: is the dead person really there? Does she (in the case of this play) have memories? And ethically, what are you doing conjuring her up?
Despite the title, the play begins in an almost light-hearted way. A young man and woman sitting opposite each other in a clinically lit room banter and laugh. She was a children’s television presenter. He, a friend since childhood, a lawyer. Questions and demands bubble up. Are you still with Kit? she asks. What did you see in Brodie? he responds. The dialogue is quick and often very funny. It’s like any reunion of old friends. But she is dead. She was killed, we learn, in a car crash on New Year’s Eve ten years before. Laughter dies as raw emotions surface. She has one insistent request: Tell me how I died. Bit by bit we piece together more of the story. She was with Brodie. They’d been drinking. She decided to drive.
But there is more, so much more, to their story as it unfolds. Neat interludes between scenes see the pair acting out brief sketches of the old friends, laughing, playing, dancing together to the pop songs of their shared past. The two actors – Lois Baglin and Tom Gould-Scott – are perfectly matched, their relationship volatile. There is so much warmth between them, so much familiarity. But painful emotions are evidently still raw. Laughter can turn to anger in a moment.
It’s a tightly structured piece, cleverly concealing its climax.
Runs until 3 February 2024
