Guest Blog: Director Kirsty Housley On A PACIFIST'S GUIDE TO THE WAR ON CANCER

It's 2014 and I'm sitting in Toynbee Hall in east London, watching the first sharing of Bryony Kimmings' A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer. A woman walks nervously across the stage and starts to speak. She is not an actor. Her name is Lara Veitch. She is 25 years old.

There were other elements to that sharing, including the usual theatre things: actors pretending to be people they're not, saying lines written for them by someone else, singing songs and dancing. It was funny, moving, weird and brilliant. But it was Lara and the other two women who stood up that day and told us about their real, lived experiences that stayed with me.

Between that first sharing and this tour, the show has travelled a long way, and so has the team behind it. The show opened in Manchester before moving to the National Theatre in 2016 with a large company of actors. It originally charted the journey of a collection of fictional patients who were based on those people Bryony spent so long interviewing. People like Lara.

The show moved rapidly from high artifice to complete honesty, from sequins and songs to people sitting in a room talking to one another across the fourth wall. I sat on the periphery of all of this - heavily pregnant and due to give birth on the first preview. I was one step removed from everything. Life will do that to you.

But even in the haze of late pregnancy, I knew that the end was what it was all about; that the artifice only existed to help us to arrive at the final moments of the show, when the cast break the fourth wall and look the audience in the eye, and invite them to tell their stories too.

Three and a half years later I'm sitting in a south London rehearsal room with Lara, Bryony and a brilliant team of performers, designers, stage managers and technicians. I am now directing a reworked version of the show for touring, but this production is quite different to the last one. Bryony and Lara are at the heart of the show now.

Bryony, who interviewed and crafted and created last time, is at the centre because this has become her story too. We have stripped back, removed some of the fiction, and just revealed the layer beneath.

Lara and Bryony are supported by four other performers who help them tell this huge, messy story. Lara and Bryony try to stay out of it (nobody wants illness to be their story), but eventually they get sucked in.

Why does it have to be messy? Illness is messy and it doesn't fit into a neat narrative arc with satisfying character development, underlying meaning and a beginning, middle and end. It felt important that we reflected that.

Lara is holding a microphone. She is about to sing one of the songs that I'd heard an actor sing three and a half years ago. She's nervous. I'm nervous for her. She begins to sing and her voice is beautiful and honest. In this reworked version of the show, the song will belong to her. It was written for her, so really it just feels like returning it to its rightful owner.

Sometimes, it feels to me that our theatres have become places with too many rules that aren't helpful. That they are used for only certain things, by certain people. You might be allowed to sit in the audience if you behave yourself, but you almost certainly won't get onto that stage. Your voice won't be heard in that space.

Of course we could have cast someone to play Lara, but, sometimes artifice doesn't feel like the best choice, even in a theatre. Better to give the person with the direct experience a platform to talk about and share those things. Lara's voice isn't just beautiful, it also says some brutal and truthful things.

In our theatre, the audience aren't there just to listen. Every night, the auditorium is full of stories just waiting to be spoken out and shared, and isn't sharing stories what theatre is for, after all?

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer is currently at Liverpool Playhouse. Find full dates and venues here

Photo credit: Helen Murray, Mark Douet

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