Image by Keiron Crook
Review by: Blake Zhang
Rating: ★★★
Since the death of her close friend Ben, Evie has been working as a trainee death doula at a Death Café. Through music, tea, cats and conversations, she forms connections with the dying clients she meets and helps them face their own deaths. But while helping others confront death, Evie eventually has to face the loss she has been avoiding herself.
The show was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 under a different name, and has clearly developed since then. Everything I hoped to see from the title and description is here, and the show delivers on its premise with confidence and care.
The music is one of the highlights. Accompanied by piano and ukulele, the songs are gentle and fresh, while Martia Dimmer’s bright and warm voice makes them even more touching (the opening rap is also a memorable surprise). As a one-person show, Dimmer uses changes in tone and voice to move between different characters, giving each client their own presence without making the transitions feel too complicated. A nostalgic doorbell sound plays whenever a client walks in, creating a small but effective sense of rhythm.
Evie herself has an awkward, sometimes embarrassing sense of humour, which helps keep the subject of death from becoming too heavy. Her cheerful attitude towards death at the beginning gradually reveals itself as something of a mask. Beneath it is the pain of losing Ben to illness, and her fear of facing what happened. The storyline suggested by the title eventually becomes very moving, as Evie is forced to revisit the helplessness and fear she felt while Ben was dying.
What Please Don’t Die? does particularly well is finding a balance between grief and dark comedy. It never tries to make death less painful, but it also understands that people do not always respond to loss in serious or dignified ways. Sometimes we joke. Sometimes we say the wrong thing. Sometimes we talk about cats and tea when there is something much harder underneath.
Written and performed by Martia Dimmer and directed by Cece Walker, Please Don’t Die? is a gentle and often funny exploration of grief, connection and the difficult process of saying goodbye. It does not offer an easy answer to death. Instead, it asks whether we can learn to sit with it, and with each other, a little more honestly.