Getting Through It by Michael Rosen at The Old Vic

Last Updated on November 26, 2025

Michael Rosen’s story of grief is gently life-affirming

Grief, says Michael Rosen, is being sorry that things are not as they were. But things are never as they were; it is in their nature to change. With this simple thesis, in Getting Through It, Rosen turns the uniquely tragic events of his life into universally relatable words to live by.

At the age of 18, Rosen’s son, Eddie, died of meningitis. In the first half of Getting Through It, on the first stop of its national tour at The Old Vic, Rosen recounts the unbearable story of that loss. He remembers the last interactions he had with his son, the discovery of his dead body, the mourning and the grief that followed. Rosen does not speak with heavy emotion, but matter-of-factly. He takes a seat and begins his story without ceremony or dramatisation. He reads for a while, discards a one-sided sheet of paper – a verse of a poem, loosely formed – before moving onto the next. Rosen’s voice is familiar from the reading of children’s books, and his tale feels at times like just another bedtime story.

Among the grief are small jokes and delicate observations of the quotidian. Rosen encounters a woman in Montparnasse Cemetery whose son died ten years before in a car accident. She is weeping, and he wonders if he too will weep, in ten years’ time, at the grave of his own son. He describes the decoration on a postcard, the way the light from the street lamps paints the walls of a Parisian flat that has yet to acquire curtains. The world feels clearer and more intimate in Rosen’s words, heightened both by grief and the meticulous mind of the writer.

His son, Eddie, was a large man. His giant’s hand is evoked, stroking the vast space of his shirt; his body fills the door frames. Then the paramedics struggle to carry him down the stairs in a body bag, and he is placed in the biggest coffin that Rosen has ever seen.

In the second half, Rosen is livelier – more comfortable in his chair, readier to respond to the reactions of the audience. He tells the story of his own brush with death: 40 days and nights spent in ICU with Covid. He tells the first part of the tale through the words of what he calls the “(Very) Patient Diary”, letters addressed to him by the doctors and nurses that cared for him during his induced coma. Hospitals are funny, boring, dramatic, liminal places, and Rosen reflects on his stay with all the tenderness and humour that recovery allows.

Rosen, with his gift for reading, holds the audience in his large hands. He is frailer now than he once was, but he has a grandfatherly twinkle in his eye. As I believe they used to say before the internet: “I would listen to him read the phone book.” Combined with his writing – vivid yet unpretentious, poetic almost without one noticing – Rosen seems to conjure the warm flicker of a campfire from the darkness of his loss.

The second half of the double bill is a story of luck, resilience, and the remarkable kindness of humans. If Eddie’s death is a tale of how little it can take to end a life, this is a tale of how much it can take to keep one going.

Death, Rosen says, is of the body. Grief is of the mind. It is, he repeats at the end of his gentle one-man show, being sorry that things are not as they were. But things are never as they were; it is in their nature to change. Listening to the humanity in Rosen’s voice, the way that he finds beauty from the least likely sources, the way he sees love and loss as two sides of the same coin, one cannot help but feel that life truly is an ever-changing gift.

Getting Through It by Michael Rosen goes on a national tour from 19th October 2025 until 22nd April 2026.

The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 8NB