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.

The script is consistently extremely funny, and the baby-faced, buoyant Hill always feels convincingly teenage – full of racing, furious emotions, one minute bouncing with joy and the next utterly disdainful, hands on hips.

Frank, fresh, and blessedly unmawkish, Glee & Me sees Lola taking a wry, exasperated look at the responses of the medical profession (she is unimpressed to come round from brain surgery to hear the nurses listening to “Stayin’ Alive”), faux pity from people who used to bully her (she resents being their “social media pity wank”), and her single mum’s coping mechanisms (colour-coded Excel spreadsheets). But Lola also unsentimentally examines her own reactions, from stroppy temper tantrums to her instinct to constantly make bleak, black jokes about her situation (when the doctor compares the size of her tumour to a grape, then a lychee, she quips that it sounds like she’s making her way down the whole Sainsbury’s fruit and veg aisle, until she’s a cabbage).

Lola decides she must get laid and work out the meaning of life before she dies. She woos a student on a dating app, determined he’ll be her ticket out of virginity. He is, but he also ends up becoming so much more than just the “dick on a body” she claims she wants. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that it turns out it is love that means the most, in the final months and moments.

Lola also starts to make videos about her experience, and becomes a YouTube star, and the format of Glee & Me is a little like the unfiltered, direct address of an influencer. I wished Slade and Ismail had pushed more at the form of the play, however: Lola occasionally makes knowing references to the theatrical setting, laughing that she “didn’t think through” telling her story as a monologue when she’s increasingly unable to speak. A link between losing your words, and losing your lines, is briefly hinted at – but the breakdown of language feels like an area of Lola’s experience that could have been more experimentally reflected within the actual structure of the piece.

Jess Bernberg’s lighting helps, with neon tubes that crackle and flicker around the stage like misfiring synapses, while Anna Yates’ dandelion-yellow set of suede blocks, hovered over by a faintly ominous growth made of yellow duvet covers, gives Hill a springy platform on which to wheel around. It’s a challenge to hold an audience for that long by yourself, let alone in such a large in-the-round space, and it’s a testament to both play and performer that Glee & Me draws us in so closely.