REVIEW: Stay A Little Longer, Tom Foreman Productions, EdFringe 2026 ★★★

Content Warnings: Discussion of Grief and Baby Loss

The bottle of expensive champagne they’ve been saving for their wedding day has been popped – 3 months earlier than it should have been. Tom Foreman’s tender and sensitive tear-jerker explores the build-up to a doomed wedding through an intimate and conversational encounter between ‘Her’ and ‘Him’, with everything that’s been left unsaid firmly on the agenda. Foreman’s script doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel, but offers a compassionate and affecting drama with a foreclosing plotline.

On the verge of career breakthrough and headed into their thirties, this pair have everything going for them, played poignantly by Rachel Nicholson and Charlie Sheepshanks respectively. When she brings up worries about his drinking, we’re catapulted into the true circumstances of what we’re witnessing, with devastating consequences. Far from simply a kitchen sink drama, there’s an element of the supernatural that supposes the piece, weaving in questions about the opportunity cost of risky decision-making, familial grief, the toll of trying for a baby and many more. While a convincing setup with stirring, naturalistic performances, you can’t help but feel the writing clings a little too closely to mundanity.

The impending plot reveal, which is evident from both the show’s promotional material and unsettling throwaway lines in the opening act, comes a little too soon, leaving you wondering how the pair will carry the following forty-five minutes in an emotive manner. There are such high emotional stakes that are not always carried by the tone of the piece, and as the script delves into baby loss and its myriad consequences, Nicholson holds the vast emotive weight on her shoulders through much of it. A little too often, Sheepshanks’ cadence and manner of speaking repeats. This could be a comment on young men’s handling of their emotions, but it rather gives the impression that Nicholson’s character is driven to irrationality at points.

A simple stage arrangement offers the floor to the pair, who meander between lying on the couch and circling the room during moments of tension. It occasionally feels as though Stay A Little Longer could have handled its theatrical language with greater verve, although the intense privacy created within the piece is itself an effective device. There’s clearly a great play underneath the wraps here, written cogently and with care, yet the staging and delivery need a furthered development to offer up something more greatly introspective.

Stay A Little Longer shines brightest in its emotive power, that rings through to the closing moments of the play. Undoubtedly thoughtful and attentive to the themes on offer, there’s greater depths to be ploughed dramaturgically here to unravel the story’s central discourse with clearer style.

You can catch Stay A Little Longer at Cellar at Pleasance Courtyard until August 31st from 15:00 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.