This new play from Morna Young – staged by renowned touring company Paines Plough – has a flawed but perfectly agreeable first half that follows the Blackwoods, a sprawling, glamorous family who have been summoned to the country pile of 80-year former stage and screen star matriarch Vivienne (Alison Peebles) for a party. However, each of them has been lured under false pretences. Vivienne has intimated to religious daughter Lily (Hilary McLean) that she wants to discuss salvation. She’s told hard-nosed businessman son Geoff (Gilly Gilchrist) that she wants to discuss business matters, presumably to do with her will. And grandchildren Sasha (Rachel Dick) and James (Angus Yellowlees) – who has brought along his rock star partner Cass (Ruby Glynne) – simply assume this is going to be one of her legendarily glamorous soirees of old, packed to the rafters with celebrity guests.
In fact, once summoned, the family are bemused to be confronted by Vivienne reciting Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy, and no celebrity guests. Long story short, it turns out that Vivienne has cancer and has an assisted at-home death booked for the next day. Also, Geoff’s ex-wife Carol (Liz Kettle) is mysteriously on the scene. This is all fine, and while Katiei Posner’s production feels a little confused about what shade of funny it wants to be – sometimes it seems like a po-faced dark comedy, sometimes it teeters on farce – it’s an agreeably spikey and provocative play about final acts and Viv turning hers into an elaborate spectacle, theatrical and emotionally. (The fact assisted dying is still illegal in this country is never addressed but presumably Young is being speculative about a live political topic).
Then there’s an interval and when the play returns it has become unspeakably mawkish, a sentimental goodbye to Vivienne that drags on interminably and feels like it has had all of its earlier mischief surgically removed. It’s hard to understand what has happened: what was the point of Viv shit-stirring and game-playing in the first half only to ditch it all for a long farewell in the second? My best guess is that Young has overestimated how much we might care for Vivienne, or else she simply had two ideas for plays about assisted dying and figured she could get away with writing both. Whatever the case, a decently promising play experiences an unfortunate conclusion, ending its own life by swallowing a toxic dose of sentiment.