Review: MADAME OVARY, VAULT Festival

After a triumphant debut at Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, Rosa Hesmondhalgh has taken Madame Ovary back to London for what's looking like another bewilderingly successful run.

In January 2018, Rosa was coming up with the usual resolutions like stop dating losers, take better care of her body, and finally make some transformative art. What she didn't know is that her life was about to change drastically. At 23 years old, the jarring diagnosis of ovarian cancer comes out of the blue after she starts feeling bloated and weird.

Hesmondhalgh's one-woman show is a lyrical and touching retelling of her time in and out of hospitals. Her positivity and humour, found even at her darkest hour, are staggering. With a poetic script and a mesmerising personality, she details the good, the bad, and the ugly with such optimism that it's impossible to leave the room with dry eyes.

Her writing is evocative and vivid, establishing Hesmondhalgh as a precise and gripping playwright: one minute she's describing her symptoms and joking about them, the next she is delivering the perfect image of the sensory overload only found in an A&E. The whimsical nature of her text is broken occasionally by spoken word and parts that are so curated they could as well be written in verse.

The fear, sadness, the horrific routines, and the PTSD that grew with the illness are put side by side with the small victories, the support of her friends and family, and the human connections that her cancer has brought in. As she reflects on everything she's learnt and explains her "new normal", her address becomes a subtle plead to make the most of all we have.

Ultimately, Madame Ovary is a celebration of an unrelenting love for life and all its angles. Hesmondhalgh violently rips your heart out, mangles it, kisses it better, and then puts it back in your chest softly while making you laugh all the way through the process.

Madame Ovary runs at VAULT Festival until 23 February.

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