Content Warning: Sexual Assault. If you or anyone you know requires support, a list of helplines can be found on Zero Tolerance’s Website.
When We Died is an incredibly timely play, even if one wishes it wasn’t so. With violence against women in the UK having returned to the forefront of the conversation after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021, Alexandra Donnachie’s incredibly powerful one-woman play about the impact and trauma of sexual assault is still sadly just as relevant now as when it first premiered at VAULT Festival in 2020.
Donnachie’s play follows “The Embalmer”, a young woman who works at a funeral home embalming dead bodies. The story follows her at work as she is faced with the dead body of the man who raped her almost a year earlier, and we go back and forth between two timelines throughout the play: one in the present following her facing her trauma as she goes through the process of embalming this man, and one in the past following her experience of assault.
Donnachie gives an incredibly powerful performance as “The Embalmer”. Her script is both incredibly intense and yet surprisingly funny: her character has a wry sense of humour that brings an unexpected levity to moments of the production. She also delivers the emotional beats of the play tremendously, and her facial expressions and movement are particularly stunning.
Donnachie makes the wise choice of not describing the sexual assault in detail. This not only avoids triggering the audience, but it is also incredibly powerful. The audience knows what happened to “The Embalmer”; we don’t need to hear it spelled out in detail. The moment of shocked silence as Donnachie’s character struggles to come to terms with what happened to her is far more powerful than a detailed description of what happened. It also works better in the context of the play: When We Died is not about the act of sexual assault, it’s about coming to terms with the trauma, so it makes sense that the actual assault is just one small moment within the larger play.
Christina Fulcher, the movement and intimacy director, has done a particularly standout job. Donnachie’s movement throughout the play is captivating. The way her body twists and turns and falls in on itself during the moments leading up to the assault is incredibly well done, and the movement is so brilliantly designed for its purpose of showing a woman struggling to get through a difficult trauma.
Curtis Arnold-Harmer’s sound design is a little hit and miss. Sometimes the background music wonderfully enhances Donnachie’s words and creates quite the atmosphere, but other times it feels like silence could have been utilized to better effect than sound. The most impactful part of the show—the moment immediately following the assault—is completely silent and when Donnachie restarts the monologue, there is no background noise behind her. More of these moments without the background music would heighten the impact of When We Died.
Froud’s minimally designed set is perfect for this production. The staging is simple; a black backdrop with minimal lighting on either side of the stage. This setting draws the audience’s attention solely to where it needs to be: on Alexandra Donnachie.
Overall, When We Died is an incredibly impactful piece of theatre. Alexandra Donnachie’s beautiful, poignant and funny script keeps the audience engaged from start to finish, and the play handles an incredibly sensitive subject with delicacy and grace. I hope that this play gets a longer life beyond this current UK tour because it truly is an incredibly timely and brilliant piece that everyone needs to see.
Tickets are available for When We Died’s final UK tour stop here.
Words By Jo Elliott
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