As part of the Dublin Fringe Festival | Dead Centre
Adapted from the book by Susan Sontag
“I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there.” – Susan Sontag
In her book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag sets out to diagnose the problem with the way we think about illness. Her discovery was not to focus on sickness itself, but the language surrounding disease – language that can, in her view, quite literally kill.
Whether it’s the metaphor of “battling cancer” or the image of “front-line workers” during the pandemic, Sontag claims that metaphors distort our way of thinking – since neither cancer nor Covid are states of war.
Working with six participants living with long-term illness, Dead Centre adapt this groundbreaking text for the theatre. But isn’t the theatre itself a metaphoric space? If all the world’s a stage, how can theatre try and deal with reality? Perhaps, through listening to the testimony of real people, theatre can be re-invented as a place where we might live, and die, without metaphor.
After all, the one thing you can’t do on stage is pretend your body isn’t there.
Photo © Nancy Crampton
Image Edit: Jason Booher
