Anxiety. Trampolines. The Chuckle Brothers. Don’t Let Me Die Before Sunday is a witty, winding, and occasionally wayward one-person show from Skin & Blister Theatre, exploring the pitfalls of making theatre when your own mental health keeps interrupting the rehearsal process.
smart, self-aware, and sometimes very funny
Ella McCallum plays Aoife — and also herself — and also an actor playing Aoife — and, at times, a production team in a WhatsApp group chat. It’s a deliberately tangled web of meta-theatrical knots and McCallum keeps the whole thing buoyant through sheer force of performance. Her versatility and charm bring a sense of life and clarity to a show that at times revels in its confusion.
The set-up is deceptively simple: a woman walks into A&E, convinced she’s dying. From this familiar spiral of health anxiety, we’re spun into a world where the show restarts, rewrites itself, and occasionally bounces off a trampoline. The early scenes in the hospital — brought vividly to life by McCallum’s shifts in character — are the strongest, and there’s real warmth and bite in Elspeth McColl’s writing, particularly when skewering mainstream cultural touchstones (Richard Osman’s House of Games gets a deserved mention).
There’s clever use of projection to show text conversations and development texts, opening up the writing process to the audience — as if we too are sitting in a rehearsal room, slowly losing confidence in the show we’re meant to be making. This is both the show’s greatest strength and occasional downfall. While the aim is clearly to induce the disorientation of anxiety, the reset midway through – complete with trampoline – starts to pull focus. Scenes in the final third begin to drag, losing the earlier energy and clarity. Whether this is intentional or not is up for debate, but audience investment dips just as the performance becomes more chaotic.
Production-wise, this felt like a work still in progress. A little more polish in the lighting and staging could elevate the already strong material, particularly in guiding the audience through the more abstract sequences.
Still, Don’t Let Me Die Before Sunday is smart, self-aware, and sometimes very funny — not always an easy combination when tackling mental health. It’s powered by a performer who knows exactly what she’s doing and a script that’s brimming with heart, humour, and a mild existential crisis or two. A confident production — though it might benefit from a little less trampoline next time round.
