23 – 24 July
Directed adroitly by Roisin McCay-Hines, Life Before You has been created by recent graduates and current students of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Presented as a work in progress, last night’s performance at The Alma was its first public airing. It is a far more polished piece of work than that might suggest, and in the space of just one hour writer Eva Hudson tells an absorbing tale of one woman’s struggle to achieve a sense of personal autonomy. The programme notes tell us that Hudson’s work ‘carves out space for young women to roar and rage.’ That sounds a little forbidding, but Life Before You is thankfully free from any tendency towards polemical ranting. The energy that drives the writing may well come from feminist anger, but the narrative is laced with tenderness and humour. The writing is certainly not lacking in bite, but there is warmth and wit in abundance.
This play’s greatest strength is that the central character, Grainne, is a very believable, three-dimensional human being. Life before You is very much her story, and British-Australian actor Rose Adams brings Grainne to life in a thoroughly convincing fashion. We first meet her as an intelligent, sparky young woman in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. She falls pregnant to Tom, a smooth-talking soldier, and is rejected by her mother. However unconvincing Tom’s claim might be that ‘Surrey is like Marbella, only better,’ Grainne has little choice but to follow him to England. Time jumps forward and Grainne, now the mother of a much-loved but demanding daughter, is caught in a trap of suffocating domesticity. Tom is frequently absent, and Eimear, her daughter, is off to Oxford, where she quickly adopts the social mores and manners of her new, upper middle-class friends. Adams perfectly captures the bewilderment and frustration of a mother who finds that her daughter has become an alien being who claims the high moral ground of vegetarian eco-awareness, yet nevertheless relies on her mother to finance her increasingly self-indulgent lifestyle.
Georgia Cudby endows daughter Eimear with comic emotional incontinence, every flouncing gesture vividly conveying self-righteous, sulky neediness. Her voice could be a little stronger at times, but this is an enjoyable characterisation, even if some aspects of it are somewhat clichéd.
Soldier Tom is portrayed by Nuhazet Diez Cano, who makes the most of what is a rather underwritten role. The fantasy scenes where Grainne imagines Tom’s encounters with a variety of foreign lovers are amusingly done, with Cudby skilfully multi-tasking as his exotic girlfriends, but it might be that Life Before You would be more powerful as a two-hander that focused entirely on the mother-daughter relationship. Conversely, Tom’s role could be fleshed out further.
Women who refuse to be defined entirely by their familial relationships make for good drama, and the idea that they might have to disappear entirely in order to discover themselves is reminiscent of Shirley Valentine, or even A Doll’s House. Yet there is a welcome freshness about Life Before You. Grainne is a splendid creation, brought to life in a magnetic performance by Rose Adams. Her final soliloquy is a very effective piece of writing, powerfully delivered. Bravo!
★★★☆☆ Mike Whitton, 24 July 2023
Photo credit: Craig Fuller
