Life Before You – Spielman Theatre

Life Before You is a new play written by Eva Hudson and directed by Roisin McCay-Hines.

The pair were inspired by their shared experiences of navigating medical misogyny and understandings of class and female identity. Both also had the same experience of being daughters of Northern Irish mothers who moved to England and raised their children here.

Life Before You addresses women’s healthcare issues, class and survival as well as the erasure of aging women. Looking at the fault lines between mothers and daughters, it ask – what do we pass on and how do we escape the lives written for us?

Gráinne leaves Ardoyne, Belfast, for England, chasing the promise of a better life for her daughter. She scrubs, she bleaches, she sacrifices— and piece by piece, she begins to disappear.

Eimear grows up surrounded by privilege, stepping through doors her mother could never open. But with every step forward, she drifts further away — into another class, another name, another life.

As they clash over diverging ideas of womanhood, what surfaces is complex and turbulent, straining their relationships — with themselves and with each other — to breaking point.