Interview: Beth May on B wants the D

Beth May‘s award-winning autobiographical dark comedy Beth Wants the D opens with her on the edge of a bridge, contemplating ending her life, before taking the audience on an episodic, laugh-out-loud journey through her life with bipolar disorder. After a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run and the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, it makes its London debut at Pleasance London, directed by Riley Rose Critchlow. May tells Red Bus Londinium she hopes audiences feel seen, and that the heart of the show lies in the moments of shame and embarrassment.

Red Bus: The show begins with you standing on the edge of a bridge. How did you decide to open there, and how do you carry the audience from that moment into the laughter that follows?

Beth May: Opening on the bridge was my way of taking maybe the most important decision of my life and making it the most important decision of the show. The audience knows I didn’t jump off that bridge, so I’m about to tell them how I got there, why I didn’t jump, and how easily the ending could have been very different. Suicide is rightfully this extremely weighted and traumatic topic for a lot of people, so I also feel that starting on the bridge contemplating suicide in what is otherwise a comedy is my way of laying all the cards out on the table. If the audience is willing to stay with me on that bridge, they’ll be willing to go with me on the rest of the journey.

Red Bus: Beth Wants the D won the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award in Edinburgh. Have audience members talked to you after performances, and is there a conversation that has stayed with you?

Beth May: I can honestly say the conversations I’ve had with audience members after this show have been incredibly insightful and they’ve touched me deeply. One that springs immediately to mind is someone who had recently lost their mother by suicide, and how they felt they understood their mother and her decision a bit more after seeing the show. I was very moved by that, because I never want to feel like I’m speaking over someone else or dictating their experience, but I do think so many of these hard feelings are quite universal, and I think to have a shared language through which to share them is so important. Maybe it sounds presumptuous but I really hope people feel seen when they watch the show.

Red Bus: Writing comedy from your own experience of bipolar disorder means deciding what is yours to joke about. Was there anything you wrestled with including, and did the people who appear in your story get a say?

Beth May: This is an interesting question because I did in fact wrestle with including anything having to do with other people at all. I have a scene that takes place in a psych ward group therapy session, where I’m performing as these real people, despite giving them pseudonyms, and obviously this is such a personal and raw experience for anyone in that setting, and I never wanted the audience to feel like I was exploiting other patients or using their illness as a punchline. I think what ultimately made me include the scene was the fact that these people were often funny not because of their mental illness, but despite it. There’s a resiliency there and a comradery that I wanted to show. I also more broadly wanted to talk about the deleterious effect mental illness has on the people in its proximity. I’ve really hurt, worried, and annoyed the people I love throughout my illness, and I wanted to offer insight into why that was while also just owning up to this very ugly aspect of my behaviour.

Red Bus: This is the London debut, in the Pleasance Main House Cabaret after a sell-out Fringe run. What, if anything, has changed in the show since Edinburgh, and what are you curious to find out about a London audience?

Beth May: For the Fringe run I had to cut about 15 minutes out of my original script from 2023, which was such a good lesson on the killing of darlings and the beauty of brevity, but there were sections I definitely missed, stuff that I thought added needed context and flavor, and so I’ve added some of it back in and added a couple of new things as well. I see the script as a bit of a living document as I continue to reckon with living with bipolar and what it teaches me, so I feel really fortunate to have the opportunity to experiment a bit with this London audience, see what they find funny, and see which version feels most true to the story I want to tell.

Red Bus: You worked with director Riley Rose Critchlow to shape an episodic story from your teenage years to the present into 75 minutes. How did you decide what stayed and what went, and what would you most like someone living with serious mental illness to take home with them?

Beth May: When I was writing the show I relied a lot on some advice from my friend Alice Stanley Jr., who told me to lean into feelings of shame or embarrassment, because that’s where the heart of the story was. So if I went through the outline of a scene and it wasn’t at least a little bit embarrassing, or if it didn’t remind me of an intense feeling of shame, I cut it out. I think that’s why it was so cathartic to write this show. Working with Riley was a complete dream because they were able to take the shame in my head and turn it into a very raw stage experience where it’s an emotion that feels accessible, shareable. Riley always encouraged me to stay true to my natural impulses instead of disappearing into more of a fictionalized version of myself, and I think the result is you get something that feels almost invasive in its transparency, which is a dream come true both as a writer and performer.

Booking details

Show: Beth Wants the D
Venue: Pleasance London (Main House Cabaret), Carpenters Mews, North Road, London N7 9EF
Dates and time: Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October 2026, 9pm
Running time: 75 minutes
Price: £15
Age guidance: 14+
Content warnings: Strong language, limited audience participation, themes and discussions of mental illness and suicidal ideation
Book tickets: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/beth-wants-d

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Interview: Beth May on B wants the D

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