Stayin’ Alive at 53two

Maggie’s stuck. Stuck in her Nan’s house, stuck in her head, stuck between grief and the business of living – that’s the basic situation in Stayin’ Alive, and it’s a brutally good one. Not because the play trades in tragedy, but because it starts from the boring, unglamorous truth of loss: the world keeps turning, and you’re left sitting alone, unable to move on.

Victoria Oxley’s writing refuses to neaten that experience into something inspirational. Maggie’s Nan is dead, her therapist is useless, and her sister is threatening to knock her out. Care and conflict sit uncomfortably side by side, as they often do in families under pressure. Maggie is still in her Nan’s house, the walls closing in, surrounded by voices trying – and failing – to help. This isn’t a solemn endurance test. It’s a darkly comic sprint through the rituals we invent to get through a day, the interruptions that barge into private grief, and the moments where survival begins to look like something you might actively choose.

That sense of noise is built into the show’s texture. Told with a nostalgic soundtrack foregrounding the North West, Maggie’s unravelling and rebuilding plots a course between an Elkie Brookes record, a broken Alexa and the gravitational pull of the Blue Anchor pub. Music, memory and place function as emotional triggers rather than comfort blankets – ways of circling what can’t yet be said (or, Maggie’s case, sung).

The tone is rooted in a North West sensibility that isn’t “local colour” so much as a worldview: humour as defence mechanism, sentimentality kept on a short leash. And this voice has a clear lineage. Oxley’s company, One Madam Productions, is inspired by the love and guidance of her Grandma – a working class Scouse matriarch whose wit and stubbornness, Oxley has said, seep through everything she creates. You can trace that inheritance here, in the refusal to soften sharp edges or smooth over awkward truths, and in the way sisterhood, frustration and loyalty coexist without apology.

Formally, the show mirrors Maggie’s mental tumble. Oxley performs as Maggie, while Emma Bispham ricochets through the other presences in her life – Our Anne-Marie, Me Mum, Rob the Therapist, plus a shifting cast of guest appearances. Grief unfolds amid a clash of other voices: a sister whose care comes out sideways, a therapist who doesn’t help, and comic tribute-act interruptions that refuse to let Maggie grieve quietly.

Responses to the show’s Liverpool run highlighted its immediate impact and emotional range, with Liverpool Noise noting that “you’ll find yourself laughing even as your heart breaks”. Commissioned through The Unity Theatre’s talent development programme and later staged at Liverpool’s Royal Court, this is new writing with real confidence behind it. In Manchester, it lands at 53two, a fitting home for a show that values proximity and emotional honesty over polish.

Stayin’ Alive doesn’t offer tidy resolutions – just a fierce, funny and recognisably human account of what it means to keep going.

Directed by Directed by Megan Marie Griffith and produced by One Madam Productions in collaboration with Girl Gang Manchester.