A psychologically precise two-hander on regret, grief and the illusion of reinvention. It is thought-provoking, quietly devastating, and anchored by performances that make its moral questions land.Rating
Excellent
The Undying is not interested in whether you would take the TwiceLife™ pill. That question is dispatched almost casually. What concerns writer Rea Dennhardt Patel is the quieter violence of second chances: who benefits from starting again, who is left behind, and what is erased when memory becomes negotiable.
At Soho Theatre, this intimate two-hander places its speculative premise firmly within the ordinary – cups of tea, shared meals, the familiar geography of a long marriage. The effect is disquieting. Youth arrives not as liberation, but as disruption, and the play steadily exposes the fantasy that renewal can ever be clean or consequence-free.
Amba (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash) takes the TwiceLife™ pill first, waking decades younger, while Prav (Akaash Dev Shemar) refuses – at least initially – determined to stay inside the life they have already built. But the marriage cannot survive on sentiment alone. As her renewed vitality reorders their intimacy and his fear of Alzheimer’s sharpens into panic, Prav follows her into the same second life. What unfolds is not a fantasy of reinvention, but a study in what happens when a relationship is forced to renegotiate desire, memory, and power.
Patel’s writing is sharply attuned to the psychology of attachment and identity. Memory is both shield and prison, shaping who we are and how we relate to others. The Undying ultimately suggests that time is not an escape route: you cannot outpace yourself, and you cannot outlive the memories – including trauma – that quietly shape who you become. By offering the characters the chance to rewrite their lives, the play probes cognitive dissonance, moral compromise, and the emotional cost of erasure.
The performances are quietly devastating. Suryaprakash and Shemar navigate decades of intimacy with nuance. Tiny gestures, measured silences, and fleeting glances reveal lives lived in compromise, love, and unspoken frustration. Psychologically, the audience is made to inhabit their dissonance: we empathise with the allure of a second chance even as we recoil at the destruction it leaves in its wake.
Director Imy Wyatt Corner ensures that staging never overshadows the human core. The domestic setting reinforces the ordinariness that makes the intrusion of the extraordinary so destabilising, while the lighting and sound work with restraint, punctuating emotional turns without tipping into sentimentality.
At its core, The Undying is a study in the paradox of being human: the desire to start anew clashing with the weight of memory, the pull of attachment, and the ethical dilemmas that define our lives. Patel uses the rhythms of domestic life to probe not just individual psychology but also the cultural and relational forces that shape us. This is theatre that explores the intersections of psychology and culture, revealing how our pursuit of renewal is never purely personal – it is bound up in shared histories, social expectations, and the moral paradoxes of being human. The Undying is brilliant in the truest sense – thought-provoking, psychologically exacting, and quietly devastating in its focus on a life lived with regret and grief. Precise, compelling, and intellectually provocative, it interrogates the mind as much as the heart.
Playwright: Rea Dennhardt Patel
Director: Imy Wyatt Corner
Producer: Sky Carver
Music: Ansuman Biswas
Lighting and AV: Rajiv Pattni
Set and Costume Consultant: Sammy Dowson
The Undying has finished its run at Soho Theatre.
