Writer: Oscar Brudenall-Jones
Director: Esalan Gates
“My dad’s ashes are actually in a Celebrations tub, but don’t worry, I got a new one for the show.” Oscar Brudenall-Jones’s comment to an interviewer about his hour-long solo play Maybe I Should Stop betrays a characteristic mix of honesty, comedy and pathos. The play’s only visible character is Aaron, an unsuccessful entertainer specialising in impressions: Sean Connery, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. We first meet Aaron as he’s about to get the train to St Ives with his dad’s ashes – and is simultaneously on the run from the police.
Brudenall-Jones describes himself as “a working-class writer and actor from Slough” and summarises his play as a lot of dead dad jokes and a study of “grief in a post-pandemic world.” During the pandemic, Brudenall-Jones’s own father died of COVID-19, and there is clearly a certain amount of autobiographical content in this witty, fast-moving script.
Dressed in a grey anorak over dishevelled black tie, Brudenall-Jones is an endearing and direct performer. For a play about death, there’s a surprising amount of comedy. But the performance is also fraught with deliberate awkwardness, and we’re continually confronted with uncomfortable feelings: anger, loss, guilt, confusion. There’s a breathless sense of lurching unhappily between disconnected ideas, a leg-jiggling suppressed energy and a febrile search for comfort and support. Maybe I Should Stop is not a relaxing play to watch.
Emily King’s set design consists of draped sheets that serve several purposes, most effectively in a James Bond-pastiche sequence. A single fold-up chair in the middle of the stage, a pile of newspapers, rapidly dismissed, and the crucial Celebrations tub are almost the only props. The lighting shifts frequently between bluish-white and warm yellow, depending on the mood of the scene and the level of interiority. The stages of grief are given an airing, and there are references to Aaron’s time on a psychiatric ward. At one point, he repeats “one that leads consecutively to the other” as a kind of mantra.
Brudenall-Jones has some nice turns of phrase. Comparing himself to Arnold Schwarzenegger with his “nerves of steel”, he jokes: “I have nerves of polystyrene”. There’s a fleeting political dimension to the play as Aaron mentions the pandemic. He doesn’t spell out the fact that whilst his family were unable to see his father’s body, the Downing Street parties were in full swing. These ironies are implicit in his flash of anger as he suggests Johnson might “spit on a few more graves.”
Two years after his dad’s death in 2021, Brudenall-Jones began writing Maybe I Should Stop as a way of processing his grief. Directed by Esalan Gates, this is a powerful debut script from an emerging talent. His attempt to transmute painful, complicated experiences into theatre isn’t completely successful, but the play is always engaging, often funny and occasionally moving.
Runs until 29 November 2025 and then continues to tour
