Dublin Fringe Festival 2024: Illness as Metaphor

Illness as Metaphor. Image by Edit Jason Booher

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Illness as Metaphor. The 1978 book by Susan Sontag exploring the difficulty we experience talking about illness. Written in response to Sontag’s own experience of dealing with breast cancer. Diseases like TB and cancer often romanticised or mythologised as barometers of personal worth. Illness a metaphor for punishment, self-inflicted injury, for weakness, secrecy or shame. Or spoken of through military metaphors; invasive, attacking, terminating. Dead Centre adapting Sontag’s book to speak to six people currently living with serious illness. Cabrini Cahill, Eamonn Doyle, James Ireland, Conor Lenehan, Una Mullally and Megan Robinson, along with director Brian Kidd, recounting their true life experiences as they try unpack Sontag’s musings. Lots of sickness and pain involved, suggesting it’s not a show that’s big on laughs. Except…Illness as Metaphor is very big on laughs, offering an intriguing interrogation of the biggest metaphor maker of them of all; theatre.

What Illness as Metaphor is not big on is cheap sensationalism and lazy sentimentality. Its seven strong cast, gathered in response to a callout by Kidd, giving a no frills account of their personal experiences and their responses to Sontag’s book. Kidd, along with co-director Bush Moukarzel, keeping things thematically grounded even as theatrically things go through the roof. Throughout, metaphor is defined as one thing explained in terms of another. Facilitating a delicious conceit as each performer plays the person to their immediate left; acting being the greatest example of one thing playing at being another. Allowing stories to be told with detachment, puncturing the personal without ever denying it. Allowing for some hilarious moments of self-deprecation. Meanwhile, Kidd, as a chain smoking Sontag, reads from her book whose pages are projected onto the back wall. Soon to become a blue screen. Blue both a multi-layered metaphor and a device which allows bodies disappear, horses to appear, and an endless fall from the sky to magically occur. As videos go, Kilian Water’s DIY, shoestring style wouldn’t be Dead Centre’s best work by any distance. But it’s all part of a makeshift, meta-theatrical, self-awareness. Asking why do we need metaphor? Why can’t we just say what’s wrong with us?

In the end, Illness as Metaphor is affected by the very disease it diagnoses; being unable to talk directly about illness. For this is never illness in its raw, unvarnished state. This is illness sanitised into art, avoiding difficult issues like the right to die, even as art is recognised as completely ineffectual in saving lives. Art might ease symptoms, but it cures nothing. Also, all language is metaphor, and literalism is the lowest level of meaning. Metaphor, at its best, is about saying more, not less. Of conveying something beyond the limit of language rather than being restricted by it. And some metaphors ring true, even in relation to illness. The metaphor that people managing illness are nicer, kinder, wiser human beings. On the evidence of the cast of this meta-theatrical delight, that very much seems to be the case. Not Dead Centre’s best work by any stretch, but Illness as Metaphor is arguably its most moving.

Illness as Metaphor, by Dead Centre, runs at The Project Arts Centre until Sept 14 as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2024

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For more information visit Project Arts Centre or Dublin Fringe Festival 2024.