Dear Eliza offers a deeply touching and riveting view of a young woman’s experience of her best friend’s sudden suicide.
Anyone who has suffered or is close to someone who has suffered from mental illness is sure to leave this play feeling affected by the sincerity and vulnerability of this stellar piece of theatre.
Following a successful run at the 2023 Greater Manchester Fringe Festival where it was shortlisted for Best Newcomer, Dear Eliza has since grown into an hour-long production and gained Helen Parry as director. Midway through its mini UK tour, I managed to catch Dear Eliza in The Studio Below on Liverpool’s Rodney Street (a diamond of a theatre I was annoyed at myself for not knowing existed.)
This powerful one-person show is written and performed by a brilliant young talent named Barbara Diesel, whose writing is fresh and engaging, with a tone that deftly fluctuates from light-hearted and earnest to scathing and regretful. Diesel’s Dear Eliza delves into themes of grief, depression, and loss through a series of poignant unsent letters exchanged between Eliza and her best friend, Maeve. Diesel portrays Eliza, a young woman coming to terms with Maeve’s suicide and illustrating her own personal struggles with mental illness.
In the play’s short run-time, we get a feel for the major difficulties that have impacted Maeve’s character from a young age, stemming from inhabiting an environment that would rather disregard symptoms of mental struggle. Having to cope with a bumbling, socially awkward single father and inadequate mental health infrastructure, Maeve is on the brink of self-destruction before she meets Eliza. So begins an intensely loyal friendship, the two becoming joined at the hip upon meeting on their first day of university and embarking upon a kinship full of joy, mischief, and adventurous plans to travel the world together.
At the play’s core is a raw and unflinching examination of a friendship that suffered from neglecting to communicate mental struggles with one another. It depicts mental illness as it is – debilitating, stifling, and isolating to those affected. It also touches on many important nuances of mental illness; that grief and recovery are rarely linear and that others often do not know what to say or how to act when confronted by it. There are many essential moments of levity to balance out the frustration and sadness; happy, carefree memories of friendship and comical anecdotes give this performance a lift.
Barbara Diesel’s performance was captivating from start to finish and I can’t wait to see what she produces next. In Dear Eliza‘s writing, she dares to voice what is often unfortunately concealed, challenging mental health stigma head-on. With its blend of cynicism and light-hearted allegories, it delves into the complexities of unspoken emotions in relationships that people everywhere can benefit from.