28th May, 2025
Starting at the End
A novel which tackles the issue of assisted dying as its core, as well as the complicated moral issues that surround it. The story comes from a deepening awareness, by the author, of how painful and miserable the last weeks and months of someone’s life can be, and how inadequately the medical profession often deals with this.
Extract from page 236-237
She turned and looked at him, and said, “What if he’s got the end-of-life drugs?”
“What? He can’t have.”
“Robert, you know they’re out there. That’s what he meant when he said “You can”. He’s got them, I’m sure of it.”
Robert waited for her to go on.
“They’re illegal, right?” she said.
“Oh yes. Absolutely.”
“So what are you going to do?”
About the author
Jeremy Gray
I taught at the Open University for many years, becoming a Professor there in 2002. I have been awarded prizes from the American and the European Mathematical Societies for my work on the history of mathematics. My play Creation 2.0 on human genetic modification was performed in 2018.
You might also enjoy my play
Creation 2.0
The charismatic leader of group of religious activists breaks into a high-powered genetics laboratory intending to steal and publish files he believes will permanently discredit what the lab is doing and stop its work. His plans are disrupted by his daughter, who gets control of the stolen files. She does not belong to the activist group and is confined to a wheelchair with a fatal genetic condition. She wants to know what top-secret science can and will do, not for her, but for everyone. Has the lab discovered how to rewrite the human genetic code, as her father believes? The more she forces the leading scientist (a sympathetic woman totally committed to her work) and the billionaire who funds the lab to reveal, the harder her choice becomes between publishing the secrets and trusting the scientists, and the more risks she runs as the billionaire plans to get the stolen files back.
The confrontations between the daughter, her father, the scientist in charge, and the lab’s backer raise important questions about research that is happening today. It asks the audience how far would they go, if – as today’s media reports suggest – gene-editing could ultimately redesign the human race.
Cast, in order of appearance
- James — an activist
- A guard
- Professor Caroline Nicholson — the leading geneticist at Andersen Laboratories; highly intelligent, devoted to her science and also warm; around forty. She carries the deepest secrets of the play, at some cost to herself.
- Rebecca Howard — Milton Howard’s daughter, who is twenty-five and permanently confined to a wheelchair. She is smart, angry, prone to sarcasm and cynicism, and enjoying her brief moment of power.
- Milton Howard — the leader of Humanity; fifty years old, equal mixtures of sincere Christian and mountebank.
- Joshua Andersen — American billionaire CEO of Andersen Laboratories, vain, charming, used to power and success; late forties.