One of the many pleasures of A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, at the National Theatre, is its acute awareness that you can’t make a musical about cancer – even though it is exactly that. It makes a virtue of its absurdities. This show boasts dancing tumours. They were one of my favourite bits. Bryony Kimmings’ work has always trodden the finest of lines between the apparently innocent and the entirely knowing, and this one is no exception.
It has flaws aplenty – songs that don’t quite convince, characters that are underdeveloped – but Kimmings and her co-creators, Brian Lobel and Tom Parkinson, know how to turn manipulation into the finest of arts. I mean that as a really sincere compliment.
In the final moments of the show, something remarkable happens as audience members are invited to name their loved ones who have suffered from cancer. It probably isn’t for theatregoers who like the action to take place a long way behind the fourth wall, but it is genuinely moving. But if Kimmings and her collaborators can get an audience to unselfconsciously participate to such a degree on a press night, when I saw it, then who is to say what might happen with a less famously uptight audience? A friend, one of the world’s greatest cynics, went the other night and reported that sobs were audible from throughout the auditorium and that she herself had become teary.
Even as you know that you are being manipulated, you succumb to it. This is extraordinarily disarming, and it’s clear that the climactic moment works because it has been so carefully set up. Everybody involved in the show knows what they are doing, and even if the audience feel stage-managed, we also feel completely safe, so we do join in and shout out.
A Pacifist’s Guide may look rough and ready, but it is as cunningly constructed as Kimmings’ Sex Idiot (where the audience were invited to snip their pubic hair during the show) and Fake It ’Til You Make It (which tackled another taboo, male depression). Even if it’s not to your taste, you have to admire it. The device in which Kimmings’ disembodied voice is used throughout the show is particularly fascinating. Initially, it sets her up as an almost godlike voice or guide, which is slightly irritating. Then her authority is undercut when her primary motives for making the musical are questioned, particularly by a mother who takes Kimmings to task for having “no brains” in wanting to turn her son’s cancer into a play and expecting him to buy a ticket to see it so he can relive the experience. But just when you start bristling in agreement with the mum, you realise that Kimmings’ experience with her own seriously ill baby means that she also has a stake in “the kingdom of the sick”, as Susan Sontag described it. Kimmings has earned the right to hold us in the palm of her hand, just as she did in her previous shows, because she dares to shout out her own life on stage, warts and all.
This theatrical sharing is so neatly done that when the moment comes to ask the audience to be emotionally open and generous, we succumb to it, almost with thanks. The fact that how we get to that moment is carefully orchestrated suggests not an artist who is dishonest, but one who is genuinely taking care of us and who knows there is quid pro quo when comes to audience participation in the theatre, a kind of performative you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. It joins us together – and what else is theatre but a way to bring people together in the same room, sharing an experience and making connections?
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