Rebel Boob is a play about breast cancer – but it’s not really about breast cancer.

Using interviews of women with a primary diagnosis as a starting point, this is a post-verbatim multimedia performance which uses prose, choreography and film, to explore themes of identity, priorities, resilience, body image, grief and relationships.

This is a show that recognises and illustrates, the period after treatment: the recovery period. That’s when you start picking up the pieces and dealing with this new reality.
Studies have shown that a large number of people experience anxiety and depression during this period, when the ‘dust settles’, but it is either not acknowledged or not dealt with.
In many ways, we are still in the dark about cancer. Certain issues are taboo and we are not talking enough about the numbers of women and men who survive and go on to live rich, fulfilling lives.

This play is not about chemotherapy and it’s not about death (though we may talk about it a bit!); this play is about life, and it is about re-evaluating who you are, living in the present, and the unexpected silver linings along the way.

It is a raw, funny, honest and beautiful insight into what can happen when your life as you know it, stops. And then starts again.

This premiered at The Old Market, Hove in March 2020, and in the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2021. In Spring of 2022 it was performed at The Cockpit, and in the same venue in June 2022 for medical students at Guys Hospital and Kings College.  In September 2022 it was invited to Amsterdam for the Fringe Festival, and it toured the South East of England in Autumn of 2022.

It is currently on pause!