Archway Theatre offers a play all about love and connection

Elodie admits on the face of it, if you sum the play up – the story of someone looking for a place for her own green burial – it might seem a bit of a hard sell as a night out, but she is promising a play full of warmth and humour.

“The piece was my choice. The Archway are always quite open to people coming forward and suggesting things that they have read, and I'm quite a theatre fanatic anyway. I do a lot of reading of scripts and I just came across this and I thought it was an amazing and touching piece. The premise of the play is that Myra, one of our four characters, knows that she has a terminal illness and has not got very long to live, maybe six months. She is deciding what she wants her funeral to be like and she decides that she wants to have a green burial. So the play is about her trying to find the right place to be buried which sounds a hard sell but what she is actually trying to do is to get her family to connect with each other so that they have strong relationships. That's what I mean about the play being about love and connection and I know it sounds tough but the play itself is really, really light and also funny. There are things that I laugh at every time.

“And I'm lucky that I've got an absolute dream cast. I feel so blessed with the people that I've got. When you are the director you've got to have some kind of idea what the play is and some idea of the characters but the joy of working with the cast is when the actors show you parts of the characters that you hadn't noticed or considered before, and that’s certainly happening a lot here which is great.

“Myra is the sparkling epicentre of this family of four. I think to Myra everything is very exciting. For Myra, life itself is very exciting. It is hard for her to feel defeated and it's really interesting to see her on this journey, facing these challenges. I would say that it's a typical British middle class family. Everyone gets on. No one hates each other. There are no arguments. There are no great conflicts but they're just getting along with each other and they are not particularly together. And then when it turns out that their mother and wife is going to die it makes that disconnect between them come out even more.”

But then as each family member struggles to cope with Myra’s illness, they find themselves drawn closer through moments of emotion, vulnerability, support and surprising humour. “Though a story centred around death, this play finds opportunities for joy and laughter—a testament to family, relationships and finding light even in the darkest of times. The beauty of this play is that all of the characters go through their own journeys, intermingled with each others’. By the end, each one has gently become a different person.”