Life Before You

I can’t care for you when you’re like this – can’t love you when you’re like this – You need to be – you need to be better. Gráinne leaves Ardoyne, Belfast, for England, chasing the promise of a better life for her daughter. She scrubs, she bleaches, she sacrifices and piece by piece, she begins to disappear. Eimear grows up surrounded by privilege, stepping through doors her mother could never open. But with every step forward, she drifts further away into another class, another name, another life. As they clash over diverging ideas of womanhood, what surfaces is complex and turbulent, straining their relationships with themselves and with each other to breaking point. Life Before You, a fierce and unflinching new play by Eva Hudson, lays bare the fault lines between mothers and daughters. Addressing women’s healthcare, class, survival, and the erasure of aging women, it asks: what do we pass on, and how do we escape the lives written for us? This edition was published to coincide with the UK tour in February 2026.