Upstaged Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Just as the Bruntwood Prize announce details of the competition for 2022, the Royal Exchange receives the world première of the Judges Award-prize winner 2019. Written by Stuart Slade, Glee & Me is a one-woman show about 16-year-old Lola, a bright and brave teenager, who is diagnosed with glioma multiforme, an aggressive and incurable brain tumour.
Slade’s play is all about living, not the inevitability of death.
For those of you who retreat from watching plays about cancer, Glee & Me is anything but maudlin and self-indulgent. Witty and sharp, Lola’s teenage existence filled with ‘a million tiny anxieties’ has now been quashed for ‘one giant, crushingly existential’ problem. Glee & Me asks, if you were given a limited time to live, what would you do? Refreshing and humorously dark, Slade’s play is all about living, not the inevitability of death.
Liv Hill gives a brilliant, beautifully honest and disciplined performance.
Liv Hill gives a brilliant, beautifully honest and disciplined performance as Lola. Under Nimmo Ismail’s masterful direction, she is sassy and intelligent; talking directly to the audience, full of sparkling smiles and wise-cracks; socially awkward though highly perceptive. Jess Bernberg’s clever lighting design flickers and crackles while a large yellow parachute hangs over the stage – a symbol of Lola’s progressing condition. Dancing around Anna Yates’ yellow carpeted stage, reaching into concealed compartments for props, Hill’s performance is well-paced, punchy and completely absorbing.
Despite an hour and a half of classy performance and witty optimism, there’s only one way the story can go…Some members of the audience have reached for tissues. And on leaving the theatre, I feel surprisingly hopeful. Uplifted. No-one really knows the meaning of life – but I reckon Glee & Me gets pretty close.
-Kristy Stott
Glee & Me runs at the Royal Exchange Theatre until 30 October 2021.