Colder Than Here

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here is a play about a woman planning her own burial while her family try to talk about anything else. It is very funny, which is what makes it land.

Wade wrote it in 2005 for the Soho Theatre in London, when she was in her mid-twenties. The situation is simple and unsparing: Myra has bone cancer and a prognosis measured in months, and she has decided to organise a woodland burial. Her husband and two daughters would prefer she did not talk about it, so she makes them come and look at fields.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028. As a study text its strength is compression. Four characters, one family, a short running time, and almost every scene doing double duty as domestic comedy and as something much colder.

Colder Than Here: The Story in Five Beats

One. Myra takes her elder daughter Harriet to a woodland burial site in the rain, with a clipboard and a plan. Harriet’s response to a field of unmarked graves is to worry about her shoes and her schedule.

Two. At home, the boiler is broken. Alec, Myra’s husband, will not call anyone about it. The family sit around in coats and jumpers, and the cold becomes the thing they discuss instead of the illness.

Three. Myra presents her research. Cardboard coffins, willow coffins, prices, sites, a slideshow. Her daughters react in character: Harriet with organisation and fury, Jenna with chaos and evasion. Both are the same refusal wearing different clothes.

Four. The plans move forward and the family gradually get pulled in, in ways they resent and cannot stop. Jenna’s relationship with her boyfriend runs alongside, and the parallel is deliberate: one family is ending while another is being negotiated.

Five. Myra dies. What is left is a house, a family who have learned very little and changed slightly, and a boiler that finally gets fixed.

The Boiler

The broken boiler is the play’s best piece of writing and it is worth building a paragraph on. It is a real domestic irritation, it produces genuine comedy, and it is also the only way this family can talk about dying. Nobody in the house will say cold or ending or afterwards about Myra. Everybody will say it about the heating.

Watch the title in that light. Colder than here is a phrase about a grave and about a living room, and the play never separates them. When the boiler is finally repaired the effect is not relief. It is the sound of a family who can now be warm and have nothing left to blame.

Death Planned Like a Wedding

Myra’s project is practical, and Wade plays it for laughs without ever mocking it. There are brochures. There is a comparison of coffin materials on cost and biodegradability. There are site visits in bad weather with a flask. It is exactly the register a British family reserves for a wedding or a kitchen extension, applied to a burial.

The comedy is doing serious work. Because Myra is the only person willing to be practical, she is also the only person in control, and the planning is how she keeps hold of something. Her family read it as morbid. It is closer to the opposite.

Two Daughters, One Refusal

Harriet manages. She has a job, a diary, a system, and she deals with her mother’s illness by trying to project-manage it. Jenna avoids. She turns up late, deflects with jokes, gets involved with a man at the worst possible moment, and cannot be in a room where the subject might come up.

Wade’s point is that these look like opposite reactions and are the same one. Neither daughter will sit still and let their mother say what she is saying. The scenes where one of them almost does are the emotional centre of the play, and they are usually cut short by something trivial, which is exactly how it happens in life.

A Marriage With the Sound Turned Down

Alec is the hardest part to play and the most interesting to write about. He is not cruel and he is not cold. He is a man who has never had to say anything important out loud and now has a deadline. His refusal to fix the boiler is the whole marriage in one action: something he could easily do, that he does not do, for reasons he will not discuss.

The play gives him no speech of realisation. What it gives him instead are small changes in behaviour, and if you are writing about how the play presents love, that is the evidence. Wade trusts action over declaration throughout.

Comedy as a Way In

If your question touches on Literary Genre or on how the play is written, the tone is the thing to discuss. Wade puts jokes in places most writers would not risk them, and the jokes are not relief from the grief, they are the form the grief takes. A family who cannot cry in front of each other can be funny in front of each other, and this play knows it.

The staging is domestic and small scale, a living room, a field, a kitchen. Nothing about the production reaches for grandeur, which is why the ending does not feel like a tragedy so much as an ordinary Tuesday that happens to be the worst one.

Where the Play Sits Against Your Other Texts

This is a short play with four characters and no historical sweep, and students sometimes worry that it is too small to compare with a novel or a film. It is not, and the reason is worth stating in the answer itself. Comparative marks are earned on the quality of the link, not on the scale of the text, and a play this concentrated gives you unusually clean links because there is no subplot to get lost in.

The obvious pairings are with any text where a family avoids the thing they should be discussing, or where one character is trying to control an ending that cannot be controlled. If the mode is Cultural Context, focus on class and setting: this is a comfortable English household with a house, a car and a mortgage, where money is not the problem and articulacy is.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Use three moments: the first visit to the burial site, the coffin presentation at home, and the moment the boiler is finally fixed. Between them you have denial, control, love and loss, which will meet almost any Theme or Issue question. Because this is a contemporary play still in copyright, refer to scenes precisely rather than quoting at length, and always say what the joke is covering. A named moment with a clear point about it scores the same as a quotation and is much harder to get wrong.

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