By Jennifer Beasley.
Part comedy, part cancer awareness campaign and a bit of balloon artistry thrown in makes for an entertaining show.
Becky Steepe is full of surprises. As comedians go, she handles herself well, although at times I really wanted her to lean more into the darkness and trust her ability to generate jokes, because when she’s in her element and it flows it’s super funny. However, Steepe does some nice counterbalances with her excellent storytelling and the use of balloon puppets to tell a rather complex story of medical incompetence and her own struggles not to be gaslighted.
Ranging from her early childhood and her first brush with cancer when her father was diagnosed when she was ten, Steepe then launches into her own cancer experience when she was thirty-eight and found to have Stage 4 bowel cancer.
Now here’s the kicker. Those balloon puppets? They sort of look like intestines anyway, so I appreciate the irony here. Poo coloured balloon ‘Dr’ Dog puppet constantly didn’t believe aqua coloured poodle balloon puppet. The result – twenty months in medical denial limbo that nearly resulted in Becky-no-more.
The fact that Steepe is up there on stage with her ‘remission mission,’ is a testament to this amazing woman’s survival from terrible odds. If some audience members don’t appreciate Steepe’s ‘awareness campaign’ (cleverly done as a song with re rest of us singing the ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’ parody of, ‘Sh*t, Spit, Shaft’) then they lack the empathy to understand the trauma and fear that lies hidden at the core of this performance.
Thankfully, Steepe is a Scorpio. This means she doesn’t take sh*t from anyone! From sex with dickhead plumbers, no sex with underachieving Frenchmen, and the dreaded nuclear effects of ‘chemo farts’, Steepe offers an alternative way to look at Cancer, all the while reminding us it can strike anyone of us.
This is painfully obvious when Steepe hits us with one final whammy, the content of which I won’t disclose – you must go see the show to find out!
A great effort from an artist who has a great writing talent. TV land, are you reading this?
Becky Steepe – Cancer Card plays at The Grace Darling Hotel- Downstairs Theatre at 6:15 PM until 6th April 2025.
