Vivienne Blackwood is 80 today. And she plans to die tomorrow. She invites her family to her birthday party – and presents them with her plan via a Shakespeare soliloquy washed down with expensive whisky. But the best laid plans inevitably go awry.

After Party is a fascinating play about a family, relationships and assisted dying, sensitively handled by writer Morna Young. Vivienne and her ex-husband Bill were actors, absent from their children’s lives for long periods of their childhood. Young explores the effect this had on the children – and their ability to parent their own children in turn. Vivienne’s son Geoff makes an appearance at the party only because he has his sights set on his mother’s baronial mansion. And daughter Lily only wants her mother’s soul to be saved.  This family, it emerges, is well and truly broken, with disappointed dreams passed down the generations along with their bedtime stories, communicating with each other only through other people’s words.

Alison Peebles as Vivienne gives a commanding performance as the spiky matriarch, her own worst enemy in her commitment to her art. Bill (Benny Young) is gloriously ineffectual in his commitment to dead words and inability to form connections with his living family, circling him like moths trying to impress a flame. Geoff (Gilly Gilchrist) and Lily (Hilary Maclean) are suitably infuriating in their dedication to greed in his case and the gospel in hers. And their poor children (Angus Yellowlees, Rachel Dick and honorary child Ruby Glyne) flounder in their wake.

This is a two act play, a rare beast at the Fringe, and the designer (Richard Kent) has had a ball with it. We have a beautiful evocation of the manor house, complete with chandelier, a grand piano, dining tables, a bed with all the command of a four poster and a floor adorned with an over the rainbow skyscape. Vivienne’s party outfit perfectly befits a lady who’s lived her life in the spotlight. Director Katie Posner leans into each character’s self-absorption in the first act and allows their hard veneers to crack in act two, providing a poignant counterpart to the earlier showy bluff and bluster.

By way of trigger warnings, there’s a lot of conversation about disease (Vivienne is dying from cancer) and death. Maryam Hamidi’s Lesley is a gentle source of sense and self-awareness amidst the cacophony of self-absorption on display. Assisted dying is presented with compassion and care. But despite the weighty subject matter, After Party is a fun, funny technicoloured canter through the consequences of one woman’s final choice.

After Party is at Traverse 1 at Traverse Theatre until Sun 30 Aug 2026