Ten Ways to Die Happy arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the aim of laying bare the finite time and energy that its audiences have in a lifetime.
Delivered by host Perla Ambrosini, the show’s concept is fairly simple – eight audience members are chosen at random to take a seat on stage and invited to choose new names for themselves, before being assigned traits at birth (think creativity, beauty, intelligence et al). From there, they are walked through their new lives year-by-year, with each passing year costing them one flower – representing energy – from the stash in front of each of them. Once your flowers are all gone, so are you.
Throughout this journey, audience members face questions, scenarios and obstacles that force them to make choices that could ultimately impact their happiness – measured from 1-10 – and almost always cost extra energy.
The show revolves around the age-old dilemma everyone eventually faces – that of looking back at your life, and contemplating whether you regret your choices or indeed, whether you would change anything.
Ten Ways to Die Happy’s concept is tight, and the way it is crafted and formatted is impressive. There were moments – particularly early in the proceedings – that had me gripped and left the audience in shock and awe at the consequences of actions and decisions.
Speaking of the audience, participation is obviously a key factor in this show and whether it’s a hit or a flop could ultimately rely on the willingness of eight strangers. Thankfully, the batch of contestants that were pulled onstage in this iteration were all game.
There were twists and turns throughout but it did feel like, as the show went on, the hypothetical situations became a little stale. It didn’t attempt to broach many hard-hitting topics and a lot of the choices given sometimes felt as though there wasn’t much at stake – particularly when competitors could freely choose how many happiness points to assign themselves in most situations.
As it rolled on, the later years of these contestants’ lives also felt a little muddled, rushed and ultimately less impactful than the earlier years. The show could perhaps benefit from a slightly longer runtime to allow contestants to live beyond the age of the oldest-lived member’s 61 years.
There are genuine – even philosophical – conundrums, social issues, parables and moral dilemmas lying just under the surface of this show, that could spark a real conversation and prompt an audience to think deeper. However, I think it fails to dig just deep enough to release them a lot of the time.
Nevertheless, Ten Ways to Die Happy certainly keeps you hooked for the hour it has you, and, given some slack, has the genuine potential to provide a stirring journey into the human life cycle and our own finite time on Earth.
Tickets are available here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/ten-ways-to-die-happy
