This play had a successful first run in Edinburgh and has made several appearances since. It now comes to London at Park 90 which has developed a reputation for taking on new writing and giving it both extra exposure and a chance to expand to its natural boundaries. When you enter all you see on the stage is an exercise ball and a treadmill. This is a hint that ‘less will be more’, and so it proves.
Over the next hour or so, Harriet Madeley, as writer and solo performer, takes us on a remarkable semi-autobiographical journey. She half re-invents herself as Olive, a journalist researching an article about attitudes to death, who then discovers that she is herself suffering from an apparently terminal condition. At this point she spirals out of control, starting to act in a random and uncontrolled fashion. She declines to engage with her partner, Tess, who seeks to identify all kinds of remedies and treatments for the condition. She gets little practical or emotional support from doctors or, at least as she sees it, from her parents, and gets arrested for a series of bizarre anti-social acts. Various friends make maladroit efforts to help and intervene, but the only person to whom she can connect is another terminally-ill woman, Evelyn, whom she met as part of her journalistic assignment.
This bald summary cannot capture, though, the wonderful variety of tone and mood that Madeley, as Olive, evokes in such a short space of time. This is actually a very funny show, despite its subject matter, as she wryly points up the incongruities and ironies and awkwardnesses that pile up as a result of our unwillingness to discuss death directly. Her own dialogue is intercut with the recorded words of the other characters in the drama, so it always feels as though she is not alone on stage, as the often witty back-and-forth proceeds. Indeed, the writing is more than good enough to give you a fleshed out sense of many of these other characters, even through you never get to see them.
More seriously, however, this play does do what is says it will do and catalogues the stages and moods that we undergo when facng a life-threatening condition. In a text devoid of self-pity, we encounter fear, panic, resilience, alienation, self-absorption and selflessness in a series of memorable vignettes that get you leaving the theatre with lots to think about – which is exactly what you want from new writing on social issues. So when things turn around for Olive you feel this kind of redemptive ending is earned not willed, a natural point of repose for the writing rather than an artificial and contrived conclusion.
The direction is tight throughout, and though the video and lighting effects from Megan Lucas do an important job in adding context and texture, it is the skill of the writing and the virtuosity of the acting, across a huge emotional spectrum, that are the highest achievement. Early on in the play Olive remarks that in Victorian times ‘sex was taboo and death was openly talked about, and we flipped that.’ This play goes a long way to explain how, if we wish, we might redress that imbalance.
Writer and Performer: Harriet Madeley
Director: Madelaine Moore
Photo Credit: Abi Mowbray
Until 7 June 2025
1 hr 10 mins, no interval