Before I’m Dead, The Glitch ★★★★

“Watch Me”: A Dying Teenager Demands to Be Seen

“Watch me.” It is perhaps the most universal thing a child ever says. Look at me. Listen to me. Give me your undivided attention, just for a moment, and let me know I matter. James Rushbrooke understands this craving and it is at the heart of Before I’m Dead, his winner of the 2026 VCA Playwriting Award, now playing at The Glitch, near Waterloo Station.

Zara is seventeen, terminally ill with a brain tumour, and absolutely not prepared to fade away unnoticed. Her one demand: record her own eulogy, on her own terms, before the tumour makes that impossible. She wants to be heard. She wants to be seen. The charity worker sent to help, Stuart, is a man who has built a careful, quiet life of service that keeps his own grief at a very comfortable distance. What Rushbrooke does well here is to give both characters the same wound, arriving from entirely different directions: a childhood of being unseen, differently lived but somehow shared. The connection that grows between them is not soft or sentimental. It earns its tenderness.

The Glitch is a genuinely awkward space, two structural poles planted inconveniently in the middle of the room, in-the-round seating that means some sight lines are always compromised. Producer Eleanor Shaw, whose previous VAULT Creative Arts productions at The Glitch include in defence of adventurous mothers and The Lost Library of Leake Street, has shown that she really understands what this unique little space can be used to achieve. She keeps things appropriately spare: a few crates, a couple of pillows. It is enough. There was one moment of unintentional suspense when a crucial message written in a notebook was briefly visible only to one side of the audience, but it was addressed and everyone did, eventually, see it. Small mercy.

Myla Carmen begins as all bluster and rightful anger. Zara has plenty to be angry about: her illness, her warring parents, the particular loneliness of being an only child with no siblings to share the weight of it. Carmen holds that bravado with real conviction. Until she can hold it no more. As the layers and complexity of her end-of-life project peel away, her raw emotion is exposed, and what lies beneath the anger is her real, hurting teenage self.

Pete Ashmore as Stuart is kind and measured, oozing compassion without a trace of the saccharine. There is a gentle sense of humour to him, a fierce professionalism, and, underneath it all, the careful management of his own pain. His is the kind of performance that makes you trust a character before you have fully worked out why. Both performers can play guitar and sing, which the production uses to good effect, though Ashmore’s opening of the final song felt a little tentative, perhaps pitched slightly too low, but he soon found his footing with it.

Rushbrooke does not condescend. This is an ending that is dignified rather than Disneyfied, and I noticed that several people around me were genuinely moved by it. He trusts his audience to sit with something unresolved, and under Oli Savage‘s direction the pacing holds that trust throughout.

The quote on the show’s own publicity reads: “I’m not going to die happy, I’m going to die really fucking angry and I want people on Radio 4 to hear all about it.” It is a good line. It is also, in context, the beginning of something rather more complicated than anger. Worth seeing.

All photos: Phoebe Dyer