Photo credit: Mark Douet
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer is remarkable, life-changing theatre. It will not only change how you see the sick; but also, how you see yourself and your loved ones and others suffering unspeakable pain. The performance stares deep into the darker recesses of our most private fears, and lays bare they ways in which we objectify bodies that don’t subscribe to the constant parade of wellness and perfection dominating our screens. It also shows us how far we really are from knowing how to talk about ‘the big C’ when things go wrong.
What performance artist Byrony Kimmings (Credible, Likeable, Superstar, Role Model; Fake It ’Til You Make It and inaugural Associate of the celebrated theatre company Complicité) creates in A Pacifist’s Guide, is as powerful as any performance art I’ve seen that attempts this kind of ontological, spiritual, and exalted form of theatre. Near the end she says that theatre is a kind of church for her. If Kimmings actually did run church-based activities on these kinds of humanist art explorations I’d be rushing to sign up for them.
It’s a rare and deeply affecting study of cancer seen through a lens that is deceptively simple to begin with, and can seem slightly voyeuristic at times. Kimmings invites us to step inside the performance structure by joking casually about the slickness of set, the budget, and the imaginary stadium rock concert technical displays that never appear. She anchors herself as an effortlessly cool, chatty narrator with an icepick sharp wit. This “It girl” wannabe persona soon gives way to more of a storyteller, as we navigate deeper into cancer war-story territory. Her manifesto reaches out and gets right between the cracks that touch that illusive liminal space where real life and art intersect. She talks openly about her research – and plays us recordings of her interviews with cancer patients, as she dictates emails, and identifies important readings of texts that signpost her authority on the subject. In this context she introduces performers (her sister is one) who play versions of the women with cancer that she wants us to know to both know and understand.
Kimmings is all dressed up in edgy Vivienne Westwood ‘knock-offs,’ as her friend and most vital part of the show, Lara Veitch observes mockingly. Filled with verbatim moments and reports of events from real life, Kimmings airs her ‘dirty washing’ with increasing alacrity. But the difference between mundane chit-chat and what this band of fiercely vulnerable women achieves is something altogether unique and radically unifying. It’s not the least bit alienating – at least during the first part. ‘This isn’t Netflix,’ Kimmings tells the audience later we rearrange our discombobulated, tear-streaked faces. ‘We can see you.’
Radical feminism, and the re-positioning of the female body in pain by t-shirted women donning Susan Sontag, Audra Lorde and other departed, cancer-suffering poets and activists, bring the messages more acutely into focus. They translate the corporeality of certain types of cancer that affect only female bodies using mostly monologues and musical numbers. There are songs about surviving cancer – and living with it, long-term. There are songs that make you come undone, and songs that just make you angry and want to smash things up.
This aspect of the show was somewhat unsuccessful. But that’s exactly the point that Kimmings and company are making with this messy, amorphous mass of spectacle that is orchestrated into a requiem for all the pain, devastation and loss that cancer brings.
This is what it looks like to have a disease that inflicts cancer on all your cells. This is what being ignored by doctors when you insist that your genetic history puts you at high risk of cancer feels like. This is what being undiagnosed for too long becomes. And what becomes gob-smackingly clear is that Veitch, the real star of the show, tucked away beneath all the artifice, is neither a performer nor a spokesperson for cancer. What she is, though, is utterly compelling.
In order to truly empathise with people who suffer indiscriminately at the hands of disembodying, medicalised objectification, Kimmings needs Veitch as much as Veitch needs a platform to be heard. Together, they flip the whole notion of performance on its head and drag us in to a vortex of emotional and physical pain so devastating it tears at your nerve endings. The way Kimmings communes with the sick can only be described as just-like-real-life. As theatre it is incandescently beautiful, cathartic, and pure.
4 ½ stars
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer
Written by Bryony Kimmings and Brian Lobel with Kirsty Housley
Directed by: Kirsty Housley
Set and Costume Design: Lucy Osbourne
Music: Tom Parkinson
Choreography: Sarah Blanc
Lighting Design: Marec Joyce
Sound Design: Lewis Gibson
Assistant Director: Michael Keyamo
Performers: Eva Alexander, Bryony Kimmings, Gemma Storr, Lottie Vallis, Lara Veitch and Elexi Walker
Malthouse Theatre, Southbank
7-18 March 2018
Also playing The Seymour Centre, Chippendale
22-29 March 2018
