Glee and Me review: Frank, fresh, and blessedly unmawkish

This one-woman monologue, told from the perspective of a teenager with a terminal brain tumour, is remarkably believable – and extremely funny

Liv Hill as Lola in the production of ‘Glee and Me’ (Helen Murray)

In 2019, Glee & Me won the Bruntwood Judges’ prize – an award for an unproduced play, entered anonymously. I bet those same judges nearly dropped the trophy when they found out this one-woman monologue, told from the perspective of a teenager with a terminal brain tumour, was in fact written by a middle-aged man.

Because Stuart Slade (who also wrote the acclaimed BU21, about a terrorist attack survivor’s group) inhabits the mind of Lola, a 16-year-old facing death, quite brilliantly. Glee & Me is a remarkably believable dive into the experience of losing that mind, as her glioma or “glee” – a type of brain tumour, in her case a rare, aggressive grade-4 cancer – eventually attacks the parts of the brain that deal with motor function, and with speech.

It sounds like the premise for a short, sharp fringe or studio show, but Glee & Me runs at an hour and 45 minutes, in the main space of the Manchester Royal Exchange. It might benefit from losing 15 minutes somewhere in the middle, but mostly races past, making the case for allowing this story space to breathe. And in casting Liv Hill – best known for the BBC miniseries Three Girls – as Lola, director Nimmo Ismail’s production has found a performer who matches the material seemingly effortlessly.