Review: MY LEFT BREAST at the Baxter Theatre Centre Is a Magnificent Ode to Grief and Womanhood

I finally got round to seeing MY LEFT BREAST so, while this review is a belated one, it still leaves you with a bit of time to catch this show – and catch it you should.

MY LEFT BREAST is a one-woman show, starring Shannon Esra as Susan, a “one-breasted, menopausal, Jewish, bisexual, lesbian mom” as the character emphatically states during this engaging comedy-drama.

This conversational piece, written by Susan Miller, is at once an ode to the resilience of the female body and a poignant exploration of the inevitabilities of grief. Susan grieves for many things: her left breast, after her mastectomy; her period; age 35; her old neighbourhood; her former partner, Franny; and her infant son, who is now 20. Indeed, there is so much beauty in loving and living and yet, to love is, often, to lose. Often, we mourn in the moment, for past versions of ourselves and our loved ones. This play delicately explores this contradiction: we can grieve for what we still have, and yet, we are all ever-changing, so we do we ever truly ‘have’ something (or someone)?

Esra delivers a beautiful, rich performance. She has a gift for voices and accents, and does a fantastic job of portraying characters in Susan’s life of whom we catch glimpses during the show. As such, there are plenty of hilarious, laugh-out-loud moments. I love the New York accent that Esra adopts for Susan – it matches the piece so well. At the same time, there are plenty of moments of deep sadness, deftly and convincingly delivered. We get to spend almost a full hour with Susan, which gives us the opportunity to experience a well-developed and three-dimensional character, who Esra deftly plucks off the page and onto the stage.

Interestingly, Esra first performed an excerpt of MY LEFT BREAST during her first year of drama school. The show is artfully directed by Janet Baylis, Esra’s first high school Drama teacher and mentor. How fitting this is, when this play is so much about nostalgia and about accepting our past and present selves, and trying to merge those two beings.

Barry Strydom’s lighting deserves a mention as well: as above, much of the play is performed like a conversation with the audience. Esra makes eye-contact with us and brings her into the intimacy of Susan’s story. Strydom’s soft lighting facilitates this – moving from brighter, house-like lights during these comedic moments, to darker lighting during Susan’s moments of despair, where her feelings of loss and isolation and perfectly mirrored by the darkness around her.

I’ll end off with a profound line from the production: “A scar is a marker of what was: a challenge to see ourselves as survivors”. Here, Susan refers to the scar left by her mastectomy but she also refers to all the other kinds of scars, physical, psychological and emotional, that are inevitably part of being human. This production reminds us of the beauty in our imperfections, and our resilience in overcoming all kinds of trauma.

MY LEFT BREAST runs from 10 to 24 October at the Masambe Theatre at the Baxter Theatre Centre. Tickets cost R150.00 to R190.00 and are available via Webtickets. Note that there is an age restriction of 16.

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