IT’S CANCER… BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT
Tense and deeply moving, but Karen Egan’s story will have you in tears of laughter too
There were a few technical glitches before Karen Egan’s production finally got streaming this week, but the wait was well worthwhile, because this drama/documentary/cabaret about cancer is a deeply moving as well as an entertaining production, visually elegant, beautifully written, performed and directed.
Karen Egan, who also directs, is a serious performer with a lovely light touch and she has a wonderful ability to be funny without trivialising her subject.
Her show, with two other performers, and cello and keyboard accompaniment, is a journey through the onset, diagnosis and
‘Karen Egan is a serious performer with a lovely light touch’
‘Fits in what I would have thought almost impossible – a love song to Kimmage’
treatment of the breast cancer from which she’s been free for five years, mixed with songs, gentle humour and unobtrusive choreography.
And it’s all done on a simple set shrouded in varying shades of blue, orange and purple that create an atmosphere at once defiant, comforting and vaguely ominous at times.
It states its case immediately with the performers singing Warrior containing the words ‘poison pumping through your veins, just waiting for the kill’. And having sung it, Karen relieves the tension with a humorous introduction to the show.
She has adopted the fictitious name Katherine Kirk which is shared onstage with Rory Pierce and Ruth McGill who join in with some of her songs and narration. I presume the idea is to take away the emphasis on what she personally endured with cancer, making the story more universal while contributing her own experience.
The idea works well, with some nice touches of tonguein-cheek humour, as she and Ruth McGill, do a send-up of the kind of gushing promotional language you so often get with singer/songwriters.
She goes to the extent of saying she didn’t really have cancer –‘just a tiny bit’ and making fun of that ridiculous expression ‘my truth’.
Not that there’s much to laugh about in cancer.
She brings us through all the emotions from anxiety, apprehension, awfulness of chemotherapy and exhaustion, including the song Chemo, when ‘purple liquid fills my veins’, while always taking into account others who have had a much worse experience.
Yet she still manages to get in what I would have thought almost impossible – a witty love song to Kimmage, where she lives, a place that has ‘got the edge on Walkinstown’, has the river Poddle and is ‘Terenure in camouflage’.
Her account of her years living in Finland is satirised in a gloomy piece of pseudo-serious dramatic Finnish dialogue.
The tortuous process of being tested and treated for cancer even has its lighter side, but with the introduction of the character Barry, her brother, who has endured a horrendous life of multiple illnesses, the show darkens considerably.
Yet it never deteriorates into hopeless gloom and draws to an end with a profoundly thoughtful reflection on life, her family and exhausted nurses, as we ‘live in our little time warps, orbiting an imperfect world’ being grateful, before finishing with the haunting Warrior, accompanied on keyboard and cello by Cian Boylan and Damian Evans.