Right Before I Go - Fringe Review

Thomas Levi
14 hours ago
2 min read

★★★★★

Written and performed by Stan Zimmerman, Right Before I Go is an important piece of verbatim theatre which approaches suicide with extraordinary care, transforming real final letters into a performance that is deeply moving, quietly educational and profoundly human.

Following the suicide of his close friend Kevin, Zimmerman began searching for a way to understand an experience that is impossible to explain. The result is a script built from genuine suicide notes and testimonies from those who survived attempts. Read by a rotating cast, the production gives voice to celebrities, veterans, LGBTQ+ people, teenagers and ordinary individuals who made the difficult decision to end their lives, revealing the complexity behind every statistic.

There is no attempt to dramatise or sensationalise these stories. Instead, Claire-Marie Hall, Claire Feuille, Sam Stuart Fraser and Philip Smithey approach each testimony with remarkable honesty, allowing the words themselves to carry their emotional weight. Their performances never feel like impersonations of the people they’re representing. They become careful custodians of voices that deserve to be heard.

One of the earliest excerpts, taken from author David Foster Wallace, compares suicide to choosing to jump from a burning building rather than being consumed by the flames. It is a devastating metaphor that immediately reframes how the audience understands suicidal thinking, replacing judgement with empathy. Throughout the piece, similarly personal accounts are interwoven with carefully chosen statistics, including the sobering fact that 180 people around the world will die by suicide during the hour of the performance and the disproportionate impact on LGBTQ+ communities. Those facts never interrupt the emotional journey; they sharpen it, they make it real.

The post-show conversation invites audiences to continue discussing mental health rather than quietly leaving with difficult emotions bottled up. That decision reflects the show’s purpose: encouraging conversations that so often never happen until it’s too late.

Right Before I Go is compassionate without becoming sentimental, informative without feeling didactic, and emotionally devastating without exploiting its subject. You leave thinking about the people in your own life who may need someone to ask how they’re really doing. Right before you leave the Fringe, make sure Right Before I Go is one show you don’t miss.