Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 12 September 2012, and touring

“THIS is the real world,” says Alison Peebles to the audience at the start of the show.

SHE wants us to know she is not playing a character, as she so often has since co-founding Communicado in 1983 and establishing herself as one of Scotland’s leading performers. Here, in this National Theatre of Scotland production, she is playing herself and, in particular, putting centre stage her experience of multiple sclerosis. This time, she has taken on a part she can’t escape from.

Alison Peebles (photo Simon Murphy)

Of course, she is still on a stage and My Shrinking Life is nothing if not theatrical. With a set by Chloe Lamford that is somewhere between a studio theatre and an operating theatre, this is less the real world than an imaginative response to it. A hospital lamp hovers over a clear space where dancers strut their stuff, while Peebles hobbles by, remembering the agile young thing she once was. The show has a cabaret feel as they parade in glittering dresses, relax in a dressing room and deliver speeches into microphones.

The fragmentary scenes express the mixture of emotions Peebles has felt since being diagnosed with the degenerative disease just over a decade ago. She laments the loss of control, rages at people’s well-meaning questions and regrets the imminent passing of her time in the limelight.

All of this she does with a dry humour, throwing knowing glances at the audience and refusing to get sentimental or maudlin. It would be easy for a production on this subject to pray on our emotions, but Peebles is in no mood to play the victim. The reality of her own experience, whether as an actor or MS patient, is altogether more mundane than her co-stars seem to expect. When Hanna Stanbridge gives a hysterical reading of a speech by Nina, the frustrated young actress in Chekhov’s The Seagull, all Peebles can do is raise a bemused eyebrow.

Directed by Lies Pauwels (whose radical version of David Harrower’s Knives in Hens played at Eden Court in 2011), the show contrasts the still glamorous but increasingly clumsy figure of Peebles with the lithe bodies of Stanbridge, Thomas J Baylis and Katie Armstrong as they perform summersaults and do the spits. They represent the dexterity Peebles has slowly been losing and bring a dynamic energy the show might otherwise have lacked.

If the production has the inconclusiveness of real life and an unevenness owing to its open-ended structure, it is also an honest, imaginative and singular response to an experience none of us would envy.

© Francis McLachlan, 2012

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland