A witty, smartly performed cautionary tale about the price of success. While its direction doesn’t embrace the darkness at the heart of its story, standout performances and a rambunctious soundtrack shine through.Rating
Good
What’s the price of success, and how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it? These questions sit at the heart of Sophia Kemsley’s Dance Til You’re Dead, a sharp and frequently funny exploration of ambition, power and proximity.
Lily (Zuleika Lavender) is a young actress who no longer feels particularly young, stalled at the starting line of her career with no agent, no auditions and no breakout role in sight. Enter Noah (Laurence Maguire), an ambiguously connected creative pushing 40, whose industry connections are constantly suggested but never fully defined. Together they form a co-dependent, toxic relationship, with Lily positioned as muse rather than beneficiary, while Noah clings to her youth to stave off his own insecurities.
As Lily and Noah drift through late-night parties and networking events, we meet Niamh (Kimberley Sinclair), the patron saint of Echo Falls and Lily’s soon-to-be best friend, and Bob (Fiin Andreae), a director who calls Noah’s bluff, though he perhaps doesn’t have pure intentions himself. Through a whirlwind of late nights, messy kebabs, and the highlight of a claustrophobic audition, we see the price that Lily is willing to pay for success on her own terms.
Lavender is a standout, capturing Lily’s oscillation between child-like glee and clever self-awareness with ease, neatly embodying the cliche of being “mature for her age”. Maguire offers a sharp and comedic performance as Noah, but the script’s insistence on his being near-40 is at times hard to believe; a small adjustment to his age, but not his power, would’ve aided the core message of the show.
Kemsley’s writing is whip-smart, exposing the absurdity of creative struggle where you’re picked apart by friends, lovers, and casting agents alike. Under Vera Majoor’s direction, the cast is encouraged to revel in the comedy, though unfortunately, this results in a lack of tension at times. Less-developed characters Niamh and Bob slow the action with sluggish staging and body language when compared to Lily’s frantic desperation and Noah’s panicked mid-life crisis.
The soundtrack in particular soars, bouncing through club hits like ‘Heads Will Roll’ to the very on-the-nose ‘Vienna’, though at times the lighting and sound design struggle to keep up with the big swings the soundtrack is making. A minimalist set allows scenes to shift fluidly through movement and props, though the costume design struggled to keep up with this pace, unfortunately, with the script too often not aligning with what’s seen on stage, disrupting the sense of place.
For a play interrogating the cost of fame, Dance Til You’re Dead ultimately lacks a consistent sense of danger, with the industry only truly lashing out at Lily during a shock ending that doesn’t feel necessarily earned. Even during Lily and Noah’s inevitable fight, you never truly feel afraid of him for her, nor does she seem particularly scared herself. There is more pity than fear for a man who has been taking advantage of her, making Noah feel more a tragic figure. It’s hard not to wonder if the abuse of power would’ve been easier to contextualise if Noah truly looked like someone nearing 40, making the age difference more apparent, or wasn’t treated so heavily as an object to be pitied rather than an industry predator.
Dance Til You’re Dead is witty, engaging and smartly performed, but its reluctance to fully embrace the darkness of its subject matter leaves it hovering just short of its sharpest potential – like the club lights coming on just as you were entering the dance floor.
Written by Sophia Kemsley
Directed by Vera Majoor
Costume by Nellie Blake
Intimacy Coordination by Amelie Kirk-Slater
Dance Til You’re Dead has completed its current run.
