Musical theatre has been a timid thing over the past 20 years. Cautious in its sounds and its subjects. I remember only three shows that have shaken me. Shockheaded Peter, Jerry Springer: The Opera and London Road. Now A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer is on its way to joining them.
Bryony Kimmings, Brian Lobel and Tom Parkinson have – how daft it sounds, and how unappetising – made a musical about cancer. Judith Dimant, for Complicite, co-produces with the National Theatre. They have based their show on the experience of real people, not least on Kimmings herself, whose own child was ill.
Here is a girl with a rare inherited disorder: has the baby she is carrying got it too? Here is a young man with bladder cancer, covering up to his office the reason for his absence. These are experienced patients, used to wearing gowns stamped with “hospital property”. But a woman with a sick baby is new to the Kingdom of the Sick. She has to learn its vocabulary, its geography, its rules. She has to learn to avoid those friends who greet the news of her diagnosis with a “cancer face”. A line of waiting patients demonstrate the phenomenon, crumpling their features in wistfulness and compassion.
Her new companions are cancer cells. They prance around as jocular, sparkling creatures: Teletubbies in Christmas gear. As these cells bounce cheerily across the stage, dun-coloured growths puff out from the walls like bendy castles. One response to a terminal diagnosis is wild grasping at a tiny hope. A dying woman tears off her turban, sticks on an afro wig and shimmies, glittering with a backing chorus, as she sings of A Miracle Cure.
The visual jollity is deranging. As is Lewis Gibson’s soundscape. There are an extraordinary three minutes when all you hear is the sound of an MRI scan. And a moment when a doctor, delivering news that is hard to take in, seems to be speaking underwater. A man in an oxygen mask wheezes as if supplying a descant. A woman with ovarian cancer finds that as her stomach fills with water it unleashes gigantic gurgles.
And then the songs: whooping, thrumming, angry. People don’t always become less themselves because they are ill. Golda Rosheuvel, the voice of the evening, delivers an amazing torch song.
I want to argue with a lot in this show. The assumption that all this is “taboo”. That one of the disastrous effects of British reticence is that no one talks about death and disease. That is not my experience. Nor is the news from the palliative expert who says that death comes – almost always – with peace and calm. Death can seem a dreadful struggle to those who watch it. The denying of this is a real taboo. One that helps to prevent proper discussion of the law on assisted dying.
But I don’t argue with it being there. This is a work in progress. It wobbles. It is messy. It should be cut. When it opens itself out to the audience – call out the names of people who you want to remember – it risks being maudlin. But that audience is itself opened out. They say so as they leave the theatre. There were tears on both sides of me in the stalls. But as well, perhaps more than that: there was recognition. So this is vital.
