“How to Fight Loneliness” at Park Theatre
Neil Dowden in North London
25 April 2025
The UK premiere of Neil LaBute’s 2017 play How to Fight Loneliness at Park Theatre couldn’t be more timely. Its controversial and emotive subject is assisted dying, while the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill is currently going through the Houses of Parliament. LaBute was inspired to write the drama by the painfully drawn-out death of his mother a few years ago when she begged to be put her out of her misery, but he felt unable to help. The play starkly if not always convincingly presents the dilemma of whether or not terminally ill people should be allowed the agency of choosing when and how they die.
Morgan Watkins and Archie Backhouse.
Photo credit: Mark Douet.
At the outset we see a smartly dressed, middle-class couple, Jodie and Brad, awaiting the arrival of a visitor to their home. There are nibbles laid out, with easy listening music on a record player, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly tense as the prearranged time nears. They start to bicker: he wants to cancel, she doesn’t. When the socially awkward, blue-collar Tate – whom Jodie knew at high school – arrives there is a weak attempt at small talk before, finally, Jodie asks Tate directly: will he agree to kill her?
Jodie’s brain tumour has returned after three years in remission, and she cannot bear the thought of going through the excruciating medical treatment again. She has remembered that Tate had been accused of mercy killing his stepbrother in hospital, and she wants him to do the same for her. Brad does not want her to give up on life, but is this because he is thinking more about his own needs than hers? After heated arguments a date is fixed.
The credibility of the story is compromised by the fact that ten US states allow medical aid in dying (and one of them – Oregon – is mentioned in the play), so surely that would be a much-preferred option? And, though apparently Jodie has attempted suicide more than once before and Brad is not willing to be actively involved, getting someone else whom she hardly knows to kill her seems extremely far-fetched. Would they really do this as a favour rather than for money, and risk a prison sentence?
Nonetheless, How to Fight Loneliness is an intriguing if flawed dramatization of a topic that has become increasingly pertinent especially as people live longer without necessarily having much of a life. The motives of all three characters are questionable. Whatever her own distress should Jodie pressurize her husband into colluding in a crime that will forever haunt him and quite possibly land him in jail? Should Brad overcome his own emotional neediness (rather than any ethical reservations) to support his wife in her desperation? Is macho assertiveness the driving force behind Tate’s willingness to act, not bold empathy? It has to be said that this feels like an issue-led play for which the three protagonists have been created rather than one with fully realized characters.
As suggested by the title (taken from a Wilco song), the play is also about how to grapple with loneliness. Jodie’s terminal illness makes her feel unbearably alone and Brad can’t bear the prospect of being by himself, while Tate (whose mother died when he was young) has inured himself to being a stoic loner. LaBute seems to imply that loneliness is part of the human condition but the play is ultimately weighted in favour of people retaining control of their own lives – and deaths.
How to Fight Loneliness shows LaBute moving away from the more barbed relationships between men and women that featured so much in his earlier plays, such as The Shape of Things (which was also produced by Trish Wadley at the same venue in 2023). The taut direction by Lisa Spirling (who was associate director on the world premiere of LaBute’s In a Forest Dark and Deep in the West End in 2001) maintains the tension throughout. Mona Camille’s flexible design doubles up as the couple’s home and the surrounding scrubland – a lunar lampshade and rock-like tables with a sandy floor and tree branches, plus a vase of flowers and a couple of stools as needed – where Jodie and Tate have their assignation.
The shaven-headed Justina Kehinde gives Jodie a touching mixture of vulnerability and strength, fear and determination. Archie Backhouse is the anxiously indecisive Brad who is riven by conflicting emotions. And Morgan Watkins plays the mysterious misfit Tate with combative directness punctuated by moments of unexpected sensitivity, in a moral no man’s land where there are no obvious rights or wrongs.
