Writer and Director: Angela El-Zeind
According to Cancer Research UK, 1 in 7 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. The survival rate is 76%, Angela El-Zeind is one such survivor, having been diagnosed in 2018. She has turned her experience, and those of other women, into a piece of verbatim theatre that captures the variety of responses to the changes in their body, and to the physical and mental health changes that result.
El-Zeind presents her work in a conversational, TED Talk-like manner, describing how the elements of the show all come from interviews with women affected by primary breast cancer. Aurea Williamson and Laura Careless also recite monologues about some experiences, with Careless also interpreting some as contemporary dance routines choreographed by Katie Dale-Everett.
Truth be told, Careless’s contributions work best when she is either monologuing or dancing, the few pieces where she does both at once never quite have the emotional impact of the rest of the piece. But throughout, all three performers portray a warmth and sense of fealty to the women whose stories they are retelling.
The gamut of emotional responses are covered in the hour long performance, from guilt over contracting the disease, to the perpetual anxiety of wondering whether it has returned. El-Zeind mixes some silliness in amongst the tales, whether describing one woman’s love-hate relationship with her medications in the form of some physical work between her and Careless, or encouraging the audience to sing along to a song celebrating women’s various names for their breasts.
The notion that describing someone’s cancer treatment as a “fight” or “battle”, or someone who completes their treatment as a “survivor”, is brought up as something that some people dislike. There is nothing proscriptive about the piece, though, acknowledging that everybody who receives a cancer diagnosis can, and does, have very different emotional responses.
That desire to capture the full range of experience deprives Rebel Boob of its own voice somewhat, something that El-Zeind acknowledges as she tells the audience she has struggled with a way to end the piece. In being honest about the diversity of the women her work is portraying, El-Zeind denies us the satisfaction we might expect of a more tightly constructed work.
But that’s okay. The through-line of the production, if there really is one, is of resilience, of acknowledging the women over and above their diagnosis as cancer patients, of raising a fist in defiance against cancer. There is no single, clear cut outcome to someone’s post-cancer identity, so it’s appropriate that there is none for Rebel Boob either.
Continues until 27 February
