Mac, Birmingham
Philosophy Rainbow, otherwise known as Sophie, is 13, and she's dying from bone cancer. But she's coping with her own mortality rather better than her sister, Peace Warrior Star Calliope, her hippy dippy mother, Judy, and her gran, Daphne. That's because Sophie's got a project: providing notes to her future self so that when she is reincarnated, she can recall her present life.
In any case, she's got to keep an eye on her family, because 17-year-old Calliope – taking her first steps towards adulthood – has got to do enough living for the two of them, and Judy and Daphne have had their differences stretching back to when 17-year-old Judy found herself pregnant and ran away to join a new age commune.
Lucy Caldwell's play charts Sophie's final weeks, and the beauty of it is that she finds a way to dramatise the internal. The most alive person on stage is Sophie, who is played with winning directness by Imogen Doel. Sophie's body may be wasting away in bed, but during these final precious weeks her spirit hovers around the tense family dinner table and observes as the others try to find a way to go on after her death.
There is much that is lovely and unfettered in the writing, and Caldwell treats the subject of death almost entirely without coyness, although I found the reading from Little Women a manipulation of the emotions too far.
The drama is energised by Sophie's unquiet rage as she heads towards the unknown. But life and death are big subjects for a 75-minute play, and although Rachel Kavanaugh's production keeps things admirably uncluttered, it often feels as if both backstory and characters are cramped by the format and need the room offered by a novel to breathe and fully live.