Stella Duffy's one-woman show is about mermaids and sharks, living not dying, waving not drowning. She relates two journeys: the boat trip that took her and her family to live in New Zealand and her more recent journey of surviving breast cancer.
Personal experiences of cancer have become a whole new sub-branch of journalism in recent years (Duffy wonders if the columnists Ruth Picardie and John Diamond have already used up all the words). But Duffy's show, although limited by its format, is written and performed with such spark and a wry eye for the indignities of sickness and the absurdities of the medical profession that you can't help warming to it.
Duffy is particularly good on doctors' ability to state the obvious ("this patient is not well") and the realities of having cancer (smelly underarm wounds) versus the romantic myths peddled by Hollywood. "Actors love chemotherapy: a long slow celluloid death often winning an Oscar in the process." Duffy's honesty is immensely engaging ("We call it radiotherapy, not radiation. It's so much less Hiroshima") and she spares nobody, least of all herself.
The structure of the piece doesn't quite work - you can see the joins too clearly, and the metaphors are too obvious in Duffy's recreation of her New Zealand childhood when she swam gracefully through the waves entirely unaware of the sharks that basked there waiting to gobble her up.
Duffy's humour is completely infectious and you get a real sense of a woman who is not defined by her tumour but who knows that her experience of sickness is now a part of her and who speaks for us all -the diseased and those free of illness - when she declares: "I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of not living."
· Until December 12. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
