After Party review: Glam-ma's death-day farcical before emotional turn
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- After Party by Morna Young, co-created with Alex Fthenakis, runs at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh until 30 August before transferring to the Belgrade theatre, Coventry, 9-12 September.
- Vivienne (Alison Peebles) is a flamboyant matriarch with terminal cancer who plans to die the day after her 80th birthday party — though the review notes the play never explains how, given assisted dying is currently illegal in Scotland, England and Wales.
- Director Katie Posner also helmed 'Consumed' at the Traverse last year, another birthday-party family reckoning, and the reviewer draws an explicit parallel between the two productions.
- The first act plays as farce, with caricatured siblings Lily (Hilary Maclean), a tub-thumping Christian, and Geoff (Gilly Gilchrist), a money-hungry heir, though the reviewer calls both broadly drawn and the caretaking theme dropped.
- The second act shifts to a more emotionally true register, anchored by a moving chemistry between Vivienne and her long-term partner Carol (Liz Kettle), Geoff's ex-wife, making Vivienne's death feel like 'a good death.'
- Reviewer critiques the script for sidestepping its own political hot-potato — assisted dying is flagged as a live debate but never engaged with, making disbelief hard to sustain — and ranks its humour below the recent Lyric Hammersmith grief comedy 'Relics'.
- Richard Kent's set is described as vividly lit and opulent but marred by a tacky photographic backdrop of windows and mountains.
- The play's broader point, per the reviewer, is to show the 'humanity of assisted dying' — richness and wisdom in the script arrive only after a long, tonally flat build-up.
Why it matters: The review's sharpest observation is structural: by staging an assisted-dying drama in a jurisdiction where it's illegal without ever interrogating that legality, the play asks audiences to feel rather than debate — a choice that may frustrate viewers expecting the political argument the premise invites. For Edinburgh-Fringe programmers tracking Posner's two consecutive birthday-party plays, the verdict signals an uneven follow-up to 'Consumed' rather than a clear advance.
Ask SkimNews
