BWW Reports: SLENDER THREADS - a work in progress, Chickenshed Theatre, Southgate, London, May 28 2011

Cancer. Where to find the language to capture the impact those six letters, so arranged, have on a person, a family, a community? Christopher Hitchens, a man seldom lost for the mot juste, has written of the difficulty of conveying cancer's effect on his body and his mind. On the most frequent metaphor used - that of the battle with the disease - Hitchens has this to say:

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Slender Threads - a work in progress intended for the Edinburgh Festival - uses the plain words of an everywoman (wife and mother, spending time cooking, cajoling and cleaning) to explore what breast cancer, and its treatment, does to the family unit. What takes Chickenshed's production beyond a kind of live action video diary is the presence on stage of dancers. Sometimes joined by the actors playing the family, the troupe portray the inner thoughts of those affected, bolstering words that have lost their power with familiarity. Bodies twist and turn, as the emotions swirl around the newly diagnosed woman; limbs contort as the chemotherapy destroys everything in its path in its pursuit of cancerous cells; tenderness comes to the marriage, as husband and wife deal with the two syllables that turned their world upside-down.

There are few people whom cancer has not touched - I recall a friend who was eaten from the inside out, as if a mad, malevolent pacman was coursing through his body - and many will be moved to tears by this powerful work. Ultimately though - as is often the case - the disease brings its sufferers (in this case, the family unit) closer together in shared understanding of the fragility, and preciousness, of "ordinary life" as remission, for now, gives them Slender Threads to cling on to.

There's more development work to be done over the summer, but one can expect the finished work to be raw and real - and to help those who want to explain what cancer is doing to them and their loved ones, but find that mere words are not enough.    

 

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