Global perspectives on grief

Til Death Do We Part was made and performed by a group of eight young women from different international backgrounds.

The play was written by Carmen Rivas Perez (Jude Is Not Depressed, Camden Fringe 2024), who worked in collaboration with the company to storyboard, devise and workshop the script. Carmen invited Lara to be the director and presented her with drafts for the opening and closing scenes. The closing scene showed God appearing to the protagonist as a flower that grows from the stage. This prompted Lara to cast Chin-tung ‘Amanda’ Wu, a performer who is trained in Chinese sleeve dancing, to perform in the show as The Flower.

From here, the company grew to become a group of eight, with company members coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Poland, Lithuania, South Africa and various regions of the UK. The group’s cultural diversity allowed them to tackle the themes of death, grief and the afterlife from a global perspective.

Mediaeval but make it modern

The play was based on the the mediaeval morality play Everyman and depicts Bea going on a physical and an emotional journey. For production design and staging, the company was inspired by the post-dramatic design and use of the ensemble in The Ocean at the End of the Lane (National Theatre, 2019). They chose to portray Death as a horse, referencing the four horsemen of the apocalypse and designed by co-director Jodie-Leigh Armstrong. The score was composed by Dovile Bernataviciute, inspired by the techno and ambient sounds of British musician, Aphex Twin.