It shouldn’t be like this. The show is based on playwright Anat Gov’s own experience with the disease, which took her life in 2012 and as such, is suffused with acutely observed detail (the overwhelming amount of supplementary medicine, the different coping mechanisms people develop, the mordant humour on the ward) that will be horribly recognisable to many. But in Hilla Bar and director Guy Retallack’s adaptation, something is significantly awry and most crucially, it is with the piped-through musical numbers – which can be counted on the fingers of one hand – by Shlomi Shaban and Michal Solomon.
Not especially musical, certainly not comical enough and fantastical to the point of irrelevance, they push the show into the weirdest place but to such little substantive effect – this is not a musical by any definition commonly agreed. But nor is a good play – feted actress Carrie’s journey to self-realisation fails to convince at any point (she has stage 4 cancer yet somehow doesn’t know what it means, even whilst receiving chemotherapy for it) and Gillian Kirkpatrick struggles gamely to make something believable out of a real cypher of a character.