Review: RIGHT BEFORE I GO, Soho Theatre

There is real courage in Stan Zimmerman's building of a show around suicide prevention, and real tenderness in how he goes about it. Weaving his own memories of a person central to his life with the last written words of well-known figures who took their own lives, the piece resists easy comfort from its opening minutes, reminding the audience that more lives will be lost to suicide over the course of this very performance than there are people in the room.

That framing device is the show's most striking achievement: hearing a stranger's final sentences read aloud, stripped of context, has a way of stopping an audience cold. But it is also where the production's chief difficulty lies. Zimmerman is drawn again and again to the what of these deaths - the notes themselves, delivered with a plainness that can be genuinely affecting - at the expense of the how and the after. We are shown the moment of departure in unflinching close-up, but rarely the corridor that led there, and rarer still, the lives left in its wake. The effect, after a while, is less illumination than exposure: raw feeling without the scaffolding of understanding, so that grief is presented to us rather than examined with us.

Performed as a half-staged reading, it can't settle on whether it wants to be page or stage: the passages of dialogue between Zimmerman and his friend, played on this day by Lucy Speed, cry out to be lifted off the script and inhabited properly, which would sharpen the narrative spine and let the verbatim testimonies retain their pared-back power by contrast.

The rotating company is full of committed performers, but not yet a cohesive ensemble. Accents adopted to individuate each note sometimes obscure more than they reveal, and an unevenness in how performers hold themselves when silent; some alert and reactive and others blankly neutral, leaves the tone oddly unresolved.

This is a show with its heart unmistakably in the right place; it simply hasn't yet found the form to match its subject's full complexity.

** Two stars

Reviewed by: Jeff Mostyn

Right before i go plays at London’s Soho Theatre until 10 Sept, with further info here.