Grief and comedy? Huh?

Larkin first met Tutu in 2006, when a friend of her was making a documentary on the South African theologian. Having been invited to dinner, the two struck up a conversation after Tutu felt others at the table were ignoring her. “I felt quite awkward,” Larkin says. “He told these two young men he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize to help these guys with their career while they ignored me.”

Tutu asked Larkin to tell him a little bit about herself and so she explained how she was born in Bald Mountain, Tennesse and adopted by terribly British parents, before going on to find her birth mother later in life. “He asked me if I had a good adoption and I said I had got lucky but that if I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow then I could be married to Woody Allen.

Reminiscing on Tutu’s “incredible laugh,” Larkin explains how he then invited her to join his party for the next two days and that they shared political conversations, often with the comedian performing her impression of MargaretThatcher. “We just clicked. At one point, we were sitting quietly and not making each other laugh for once. He said he wanted to say something and I’ll always remember it – that I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it."

Alison had always avoided true love. She'd decided the key to dealing with a lifelong fear of abandonment was to date people you don't like, so if they leave you it doesn't matter. And then after years of unsuccessful online dating she met her soulmate Bhima, who, like her had come to America 30 years before to earn a PhD in Chemical Engineering but was now a climate scientist. Alison says of meeting him "It was like wearing a shoe that is too tight for your entire life, then finally taking it off."

At the end of July 2020 they decided to get married. Then five days later, Bhima died. Then something surprising happened. A few weeks after Bhhima died, when the numbness thawed, instead of despair, Alison felt an extra energy and a kind of deep joy. She was acutely aware of everything - including the fact that people all over the world were losing loved ones to Covid.

Around three months after the death of her fiancé, Larkin went back to her old friend Tutu for some guidance. She kept thinking about what he had said to her. “He’d read my novel[The English American] about my birth mother and he told me I knew how to take a difficult subject and make it accessible. “Tutu wrote back and told me to tell my story, to take a subject like loss and bring people hope.”

'Grief...A Comedy' comes to Buxton with a raft of rave reviews including this one from the Daily Mail 'A theatrical miracle - leaves you believing that joy really can be found after grief'. Not to be missed.