An audience perspective

When life is hanging by Slender Threads

Cancer isn’t the easiest subject matter for a play, but then Chickenshed doesn’t take the path of least resistance. Their new play ‘Slender Threads’ sensitively charts one woman’s journey with breast cancer and follows hot on the heels of ‘Crime of the Century’ which tackled knife crime. At the same time the sub-plot to every Chickenshed production is their ethos of inclusion and breathtaking ability to challenge conventions of what makes ‘good’ theatre.

But Slender Threads isn’t a play about cancer - it is about love, fear, anger, despair and ultimately life’s lesson - that things aren’t black or white or fair or right but often it is about living as best we can with uncertainty and the cards that life deals you.

It is powerfully staged with a simple monochrome set that expands and contracts to tell us about claustrophobia, loneliness, separation, the indignity of treatment and the diagnosis you want to escape. The story is narrated by the voices of doctors, nurses, those living with cancer and their families, whilst the script is brought into sharp relief with dance and a haunting song that weaves through the cadence of emotions and experience.

In under an hour the audience is taken on a journey from diagnosis to treatment but perhaps the most important outcome is that we leave the play better equipped and with a more sophisticated language to talk about cancer. Slender Threads says let’s stop whispering the word cancer and end euphemisms like ‘The Big C’. Its message is let’s talk frankly and openly and only then can we better support those people and families – which let’s face it is, or will be, most of us - having to deal with it.

Cheryl Campsie

July 2011