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A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer 2016

Run Time:
2 hours 15 minutes
Opened: October 14, 2016
Closing: November 29, 2016

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer - 2016 West End History , Info & More

National Theatre (Dorfman)
(Waterloo) South Bank London

A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer is an all-singing, all-dancing examination of life with a cancer diagnosis. This brand new musical takes you on a whistle-stop tour through five unconventional stories about cancer, confronting the highs and lows of the scariest word we know.

Bryony Kimmings creates fearless theatre to provoke social change. Her collaboration with Complicite will look behind the poster campaigns and pink ribbons at the reality of cancer: the waiting rooms and chemo suites, the changed bodies, the family pressures and financial worries.

Expect big anthems, shiny costumes, blood, tears and real cancer patients in this rip-roaring, heartbreaking celebration of ordinary life and death, scratching at the battle metaphors that surround cancer to reveal what really lies beneath.

Commissioned and produced by Complicite.


A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer - 2016 - West End Cast

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BWW Review: A PACIFIST'S GUIDE TO THE WAR ON CANCER, National Theatre, 19 October 2016
by Marianka Swain - Oct 20, 2016


How do you make a musical about cancer? This latest work from Bryony Kimmings isn't just theatre, but metatheatre. Her voiceovers and the emails published in the programme detail the at times highly personal development process, and a gut punch of a last 15 minutes strip away the comfort of fictional distance. It could be self-indulgent; instead, it becomes an effective method for making us confront that other, bigger question: how do we talk about, prepare for and deal with illness?

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer History

Other Productions of A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer

2016   West End West End Production
West End

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