Five years ago, Amy Booth-Steel was a jobbing actor, when she was diagnosed with stage three cancer and told she could be “dead by Christmas”. So began a journey through the depths of physical and mental ill-health, which Booth-Steel took to chronicling in musical form when her mum bought her a ukulele. Her online videos went viral, celebrity retweets followed – and now she’s telling her story in a solo fringe show, crisply directed by Kathy Burke.
The result is a lovely showcase for Booth-Steel’s warmth and stoical wit. But it trades in cliche, and its narrative ambition extends only as far as “[sharing] some of the darkest moments of my life”. It begins as an account of Booth-Steel’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, after which she must relearn the use of her right arm. Then she’s assailed by the symptoms of PTSD: “people in her head” whom she learns to control through therapy – although they still “pop round for a coffee and a custard cream” from time to time.
If that sounds twee, well, this is a show that suggests all obstacles might be overcome with self-care, an “amazing” family (including her revenant deceased granny) and a few inspirational homilies. Booth-Steel’s challenges include panic attacks, body-image issues (“I’m disgusting”) and bad luck in love, each of which is raised, addressed, then dispatched in a ukulele ditty. They’re pert and (as with her online dating number) briskly funny: she’s entertaining company. But few insights are yielded, with Booth-Steel telling us that “sometimes everyone feels down” so we should “just focus and be strong”. It’s a feelgood show about feelbad experiences that tends towards fortune-cookie conclusions.
