I ended the first day in Cambridge with a photoshoot together with the cast of Unravelling the Ribbon before their penultimate performance. They had decorated the stage with a lot of hand tied pink ribbons, which created a beautiful framing to their story.
‘Unravelling the Ribbon’ is a light-hearted, touching play about three Irish women whose lives are changed by breast cancer. The characters interact, separate and come together in a moving tale of love and survival.
Rose is thirty-four, living on a farm in Tipperary with her husband and two children. She discovers a lump in her breast, which is found to be cancerous. Her relationship with her husband deteriorates. Her daughter Lyndsey is eleven, both obsessed with and terrified of her primary school ‘friends.’ She is self-absorbed, an innocent (and sometimes unbearable) detraction from the emotional experience of her mother: ‘did anyone even bother to ask how I felt about having a bald mother? No.’ Alongside them is Lola, she is in her fifties, living lonely in Dublin. She had cancer five-years ago and struggled with her diagnosis and treatment, pushing her husband, who has since died, away.
When Lola meets Lyndsey, and is then introduced to Rose, they form intense, life-changing bonds.
Text from Camdram.
‘Women my age can become invisible. When I finished chemotherapy five years ago, I planned to combat this. My husband and I didn’t talk about my sick time after it was over, not even once.’
‘Archie used to say that I made him believe in an afterlife and he’d say it’s not because you’re religious or even because you believe in an afterlife, but because you’ve a spirit I can’t imagine being contained by a burial or ended in anyway. Not sure that was always meant as a compliment.’
Reviews: Varsity (5/5), TCS (8/10)
For more theatre photos, see the theatre category on the blog.
Cast
Lola – Holly Musgrave
Lyndsey – Emma Corrin
Rose – Dolores Carbonari
Production Team
Director – Eva O’Flynn
Producer – Alex Barnett
Assistant Producer – Molly Biddell
Set Designer – Alice Attlee
Publicity Designer – Eva O’Flynn
Lighting Designer – Tom Bevan
Stage Manager – Lily Burge
Technical Director – Toby Molyneux
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