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I Can Die Too

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Three stars 

 

When French poet Jean Cocteau was told of singer Edith Piaf’s death in 1963, he is said to have declared the words ‘I can die too’, and duly had a heart attack in solidarity. This possibly apocryphal yarn concerning such a grand gesture says much about offstage drama, making it an ideal title for this new chamber musical presented by an amalgam of international producers with Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

 

A vehicle for West End and Broadway star Frances Ruffelle, who wrote it with Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Alan Cumming along with Sally George, Ruffelle is Lily, the leading lady of a production of Cocteau’s 1930 play, La voix humaine (The Human Voice). One of the great monologues for women, Cocteau’s solo piece puts its star on the telephone throughout, as her long-term lover prepares to marry a younger model.

 

As she emerges from a cage-like construction made out of walls of hanging down phones, Lily is every inch the diva, panda-eyed, needy and neurotic. As she is indulged by Stephen Ashfield’s flighty director James, Flora Spencer-Longhurst’s stern stage manager Georgie and Melinda Orengo’s bright eyed costume assistant Lee, Lily rewinds on her own trauma beyond the playacting. Ghosts of her past haunt her in the firm of a young girl played by Maya Rugen. 

 

All this is punctuated by a series of songs performed by Ruffelle with the cast providing superlative instrumental and vocal back up from a series of pods made of scaffolding in Simon Kenny’s pink neon tinged design. Given baroque, string-led arrangements by Frew, also on stage, this makes for a twenty-first century show tune/torch song mash up with Marianne Faithfullesque intent across the original numbers penned by Ruffelle with a small army of co-writers. 

 

Ruffelle puts her heart and soul into Bill Buckhurst’s production of what is essentially a pocket-sized backstage musical that sees Lily wear her broken heart on her sleeve. Clocking in at a well-drilled seventy-five minutes, what is clearly a deeply personal show for Ruffelle sees Lily lay bare her world beyond the stage in an intimate exchange where life and art become one.


The Herald, July 18th 2026

 

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