After selling out stages across Austria and Germany, Amanda – The Night Before Me has finally made its London debut and it is exactly the right time for this story to be told.
Divina de Campo, best known to many as a finalist in the first UK series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, carries the entire show, alone, playing all the parts with vigour.
THE SHOW
Amanda – The Night Before Me opens in the moments before she is due to undergo gender-affirming surgery – a life-changing operation that will, at last, align her body with who she has always been. Waiting in her room on the night of that surgery, Amanda finds herself reliving her entire life: the hidden dreams, the forbidden loves, the family bonds stretched to breaking point, the small and devastating costs of spending years unable to claim your own truth.
Originally written and composed in German by Belgian artist Rory Six, the show was developed from real conversations with trans women. The English adaptation has been helped with Charles Hart, the legendary lyricist (best known for his long-standing partnership with Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love).
THE PERFORMANCE
Divina de Campo plays fourteen characters across the course of the show. Mothers, lovers, friends, enemies and the inner voices that have shaped Amanda’s sense of self over a lifetime. It’s a technical feat, with emotional honesty and you always know who you’re watching and why it matters.
A scene towards the end in which Amanda is confronted in a public toilet and told to leave because someone has decided she doesn’t belong there is quietly devastating and puts a human face on a debate that is far too often conducted without any.
What this show does is it shows you a life from the inside. If the person in that toilet had known Amanda’s story – the pain, the courage, the relationships damaged and lost, the years spent in the wrong skin – it is hard to imagine they would not have felt differently.
THE SET
The set design is fascinating. Amanda waits in what appears to be a luxurious bedroom but the room itself is constructed from what looks like The Flintstones’ house, made of bones, suggesting the inside of a pelvis, a womb, a body waiting to be reborn. It is a little unsettling but quietly beautiful.
I was half-expecting Amanda to make her final exit in the show, through a newly opened vaginal gateway but thankfully she did not (some things are better left to the imagination).
THE VERDICT
Amanda – The Night Before Me is the kind of show that makes you glad you went to see it. It is fierce, tender and honest – a musical that gives a trans woman’s story the full, complex treatment it deserves, in the hands of the perfect performer to tell it with dignity and grace.
★★★★☆
West End Wilma
Amanda – The Night Before Me is playing at the Bridge House Theatre until Saturday 10th October 2026.
