Hannah Gumbrielle is a circus artist and arts worker - her autobiographical show Malignant Humour, returns to Smock Alley Theatre as part of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival, after sold out shows at the Scene + Heard festival in February. Hannah introduces Malignant Humour below...
My parents knew I had cancer two days before they told me. An immensely kind last-ditch attempt at giving their sixteen-year-old one more normal weekend. Over a decade after remission, I return from the hairdresser in tears. My partner insists it looks lovely, but I don't like the cut. It dawns on me days later that the hairdresser actually did a great job (I should never have doubted you, Shirley), but my very glam face-framing layers are just short enough to make me feel like I’m growing my hair back again.
You would think having a bit of a brush with mortality at a young age, I would be more inclined to live a quite stable lifestyle. The irony is not lost on me that I spent six months having chemotherapy and another three months of radiotherapy, only to become a trapeze artist. At times I think my mother would rather I stuck to my science degree. But I take an immense amount of joy in the fact that the same body that grew two tumours beside my diaphragm and another beside my heart now has the power to lift me into the air.
A circus body is seen as what I call 'hyper-able’. Not only can aerial artists do everything from splits to a backbend, they do it at shocking height. What comes to mind when we think of a ‘sick’ body is immensely different. Socially, I feel we carry a lot of shame in being ill. With 1 in 3 people experiencing cancer at some point in their lifetime, I often wonder how many people I must know that don’t feel comfortable sharing it? Of the people who you know, how many told you only afterwards? How many told you at all? I told three people. Now I’m writing and performing a show about having cancer to potentially 500 people over the course of seven nights at Dublin Fringe Festival. 497 more than when I was sixteen. Teenage Hannah would have been horrified.
Malignant Humour is a hybrid of theatre and trapeze exploring the death-defying circus act that is cancer treatment. Based on my own experience with lymphoma, it challenges what we see as a sick body and then, both literally and figuratively, turns it on its head.
You would think having a bit of a brush with mortality at a young age, I would be more inclined to live a quite stable lifestyle.
I’ve had the idea for this show for a long time, the script tumbled out of my brain after an hour of scrawling on a napkin in a coffee shop. Two days later, I contacted the anaesthetist I last saw on the operating table. To this day I cannot recall what he said to me, but I remember it was kind. Shortly after writing the first draft, I met him for the second time over 15 years later, and he thought I was absolutely unhinged. Regardless, he kindly agreed to voice a character in the show as part of the final scene, moments before I’m lifted several feet into the air on a trapeze modified to look like an IV drip.
death-defying circus act that is cancer treatment'
It is pretty rare that it is almost guaranteed that an audience will have a direct experience with a show’s theme. When I talk to people about it, they usually politely query who it’s based on, what the timeline is, or their eyes quickly scan my hairline. Which all roughly translates into "Is it about you?", "Do you have it now?" and "Is that a wig?". However after a sentence or two, they tell me their own experience, or perhaps their partner’s, mother’s, or son’s story, and I feel a little closer to knowing that 1 in 3.
Malignant Humour runs at the Boy’s School, Smock Alley Theatre from 8th -15th September as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2024 - find out more here.
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