Anna Burnside reviews ‘a muddy and underpowered piece of work’.
Lily, crumpled in a foxy red dress and last night’s mascara, emerges from an unmade bed to answer the phone to her lover. Above her is a cage of dangling telephone receivers, placing this show in a recently remembered past and indicating a relationship full of the yearning and false intimacy of a call on a landline.
This chamber musical, performed by West End and Broadway star Frances Ruffelle, is a play within a play. Lily is rehearsing Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, about a woman on the phone pleading with her lover not to marry someone else.
This Lily falls out with her director, swigs gin from a coffee mug and is visited by a mysterious young woman offering clues to her past.
The gears change when the music starts. Ruffelle can deliver a tune and the rest of the cast are talented multi-instrumentalists, bringing everything from a rap to a torch song alive.
Between numbers there are plenty of theatrical in-jokes plus memories of a lost love and an adopted child. It’s not always clear when Lily is “performing” or just performing.
A heavyweight line up of producers - Lovechild/Evan Sacks, Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg as well as Pitlochry Festival Theatre - suggest that this is the first iteration of a show that everyone hopes will have a longer life. There is much work needed before this happens. In its current iteration, apart from the songs, this a muddy and underpowered piece of work.
I Can Die Too performs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 2 August 2026. For further details, go to the company’s website.
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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