Brad and Jodie are a liberal, affluent, interracial couple. Jodie is dying. If she can, she wants to speed the process along, before the seizures from her brain tumour rob her of dignity and self-possession. But assisted dying is illegal in the US state in which they live, and Brad and Jodie are not the sort of people used to taking the law into their own hands. So Jodie hires Tate, an old high school acquaintance with a history of violence. Brad objects, appalled and broken-hearted.
The fiercely controversial issue of assisted dying, now regularly covered in Mark Mardell’s online blog for this magazine, remains at the top of the British political agenda. It touches on everything that makes us human: the definition of life, the implications of pain, the balance between atomised choice and community obligation. Yet British theatre has so far dodged the issue. Although West End hits such as Florian Zeller’s The Father have touched on the complexities of dementia and geriatric care, no major British playwright has intervened in the assisted suicide debate. It now falls to an American, the provocateur Neil LaBute, to brave the subject over here.
Critics have not been kind to How to Fight Loneliness, and you can see why: it takes a while to get going and its centre is the fierce, burning Justina Kehinde as Jodie, whose absence is felt in an overly long final confrontation between the two men. The opening scene falls foul of a basic rule of modern marketing: if the audience have knowingly booked tickets to a production billed as a play about assisted dying, it’s not a suspenseful twist if characters take 20 minutes to mention why they’re all gathered together. It’s just a long wait.
Nonetheless, LaBute puts on stage something that no one else has in a British theatre: a conflict that is privately dividing thousands of families across the country, far beneath the radar of the public debate unfolding in parliament. Jodie believes her life is hers to end; Brad believes it belongs to both of them, speaking for countless children, spouses and parents of those who seek to end their lives. No wonder that, by the end of the first act, the stranger next to me was in floods of tears.
If the title is about loneliness, it is because this play—like all serious analyses of the assisted dying question—looks head on at the bonds that tie us to other people. When I speak to the show’s director, Lisa Spirling, she characterises LaBute’s play as “about what it is to cling to someone in that moment, versus the ability to let someone go or help them navigate something painful for you, the people that are left behind.”
Class is vividly present in ‘How to Fight Loneliness’
Spirling is the incoming director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which remains one of London’s most successful radical spaces; she’s also worked with LaBute before, on his last West End play, In a Forest Dark and Deep. Like LaBute, she’s interested in class, which is vividly present in this play. Brad and Jodie are used to trusting the system; Tate, a working-class libertarian, is used to living outside of it.
While this is in some ways a deeply American play, Spirling points out that the question of whether the state makes things worse or better when it tries to legislate for assisted dying is a universal theme. “They’re stepping outside of the state to do what they need to do, and yet what we’ve got going on in this country is a desire for the state to get more involved.” Brad and Jodie are used to the state catering for their needs and enabling their desires. Tate has no such illusions.
The ground has been laid well for a LaBute revival in Britain. The Shape of Things, the 2003 hit play about a student remaking her boyfriend’s personality as an art project, was successfully revived at the Park in 2023. (LaBute’s women are manipulative predators; Jodie has the excuse of a terminal illness and excruciating pain, but she’s cut from the same cloth.) How to Fight Loneliness will not be the play that remakes his name in this country, but it deserves credit for tackling a subject few other playwrights seem ready to touch. It is gentle, where other LaBute projects have been caustic; familial, rather than alienating.
Spirling was surprised to see early press billing How to Fight Loneliness as “LaBute’s most provocative and shocking work yet”. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she says. “I think he’s actually exploring something in quite a tender way.” She is right. And she is likely to have more audiences weeping in the aisles.
