Writer: James Rushbrooke
Director: Oli Savage
17-year-old Zara is dying of a brain tumour. Her final wish is to write and record her own eulogy and then broadcast it to the nation, on a station like Radio 4. Stuart, her therapist, provided by a charity to guide her through her last days, thinks Zara’s plan is a good idea. However, he’s more used to helping children younger than Zara and maybe his sock puppets and ditties about cuddling aren’t quite the right tools to lift the spirits of a stroppy teenager facing an unimaginable fate.
Writer James Rushbrooke, who won the Papatango Prize for Tomcat in 2015, wisely veers away from any overt sentimentality in his tale about a dying girl, and its melancholy may not hit until you step out into Waterloo’s evening sunshine. Full of gallows humour from Zara and professional detachment from Stuart, Before I’m Dead treads a careful line to keep emotion in check. It never feels manipulative in any way.
At first, it seems as if Zara is younger than 17, with Myla Carmen eye-rolling and backchatting their way through her initial session with Stuart. But as the play progresses, Carmen comes into their own, portraying Zara as capricious, but laden with a wisdom that perhaps arrives as one faces one’s own mortality. Stuart replaces Zara’s estranged parents; her mother, who is getting ready for her role as ‘grieving mother’, and her father, whose leather jacket smells of cigarettes and other women. In such a small venue as the Glitch, the audience, too, can at least smell the leather of his jacket, if not the smoke and cheap perfumes.
Pete Ashmore is excellent as Stuart, endlessly patient and removed enough from Zara’s situation to remain objective. In a brief flashback, we become aware of his own loneliness, his difficult relationship with his own mother, but he keeps these memories to himself, never intruding upon Zara’s self-mourning in any way. He may overstep his duties at one point, but he remains professional and yet is never cold.
Oli Savage directs with skill, ensuring that the two actors are seen by most of the audience sitting around the perimeter of the Glitch’s stage. The quick scene changes and lack of sound design also prevent the play from descending into a tear-jerker. Even the final scene is played with reserve and is more poignant because of that.
One scene involving a child and a goldfish doesn’t work at all. It’s just confusing and means that an adult has to perform as a child, always a difficult feat to pull off. And a guitar, propped up against the wall as the audience enters, could possibly be used earlier to signpost the ending, which almost swoops in from another kind of play.
But these are minor gripes in a taut 70 minutes. Before I’m Dead is written from the heart.
Runs until 22 June 2026
