Living Values

Written in iambic pentameter, Living Values: The Play transforms the acclaimed novel into a verse drama where the rhythm itself becomes the antagonist - and where breaking it is the only form of resistance.

When a committee of kind, reasonable professionals determines that Eleanor Mitchell's cancer treatment costs too much per quality-adjusted life year, they deliver the news with tissues within reach and coffee set out on a side table. The arithmetic is sound. The compassion is genuine. The grandmother is still going to die.

Her grandson Daniel - a writer who can barely hold his verse together through grief - begins investigating the system that processed Eleanor. What he finds is not a conspiracy but an ecosystem: compassionate foundations funded by the insurers who profit from treatment denials. Reinsurance companies trading mortality-linked securities. Data firms that monetise grief with ninety-four percent targeting accuracy. Every layer staffed by decent people doing work they honestly believe in.

Then Daniel's own heart fails. The same system saves his life - because he's younger, more "productive." Someone older is denied so he can be treated. The formula that killed his grandmother keeps him alive. He cannot argue with it. He has never been able to argue with it.

The book he writes about Eleanor becomes a bestseller. His words are absorbed by the very machinery he tried to expose. And when his sister Caroline receives the same diagnosis, he watches the cycle begin again - in the same committee room, with the same compassionate language, the same impossible arithmetic.

In this verse drama, the iambic pentameter is the system's voice. Characters who accept the system speak in smooth, regular meter. Characters who resist it break the line. Daniel moves from shattered half-lines of grief to the flowing pentameter of complicity - until, by Act V, he sounds exactly like the committee members who denied Eleanor treatment. The audience doesn't need to be told he's been absorbed. They can hear it.

"Mark well the meter of this gentle tale - its smoothest verse will be its sharpest nail."

For readers of Being Mortal, Never Let Me Go, and Murder in the Cathedral. For anyone who has sat in a waiting room while strangers decided what a life was worth.