Darkness. Pitch black.
Torch light cuts through, swinging wildly into the space.
Out glides Lucky, an angel, who always finds the silver
lining because she lives on Cloud Nine.
Lucky is a guardian angel, it turns out. Helps human beings
while they are being human. And she’s had her eye on one particular human
being, Andi Snelling.
Andi plays Lucky and later we hear about all the tiring platitudes
she’s heard over the last three years, since her previous Melbourne Fringe
show, Déjà vu (and other forms of knowing). “Lucky you don’t have cancer”
was a particularly unhelpful bit of wisdom.
Andi suffers from Lyme disease, which has brought on many
food intolerances, and bouts of weight loss and weight gain. This has led to an
inability to perform, which is her passion and her life. If she can’t eat and
is always exhausted, getting onto the stage has been impossible, until now.
Happy-Go-Wrong is the story of her struggle with her
invisible disease, with people’s unhelpful suggestions, and with the mainstream
medical community’s reluctance to even treat Lyme disease as an actual illness.
And it’s a show about Andi being back on stage. Andi has
made three solo shows now. Her first, #DearDiary, was about her past. Déjàvu about the present moment, and premonitions of the future. It was around
the time of her second show that she got her diagnosis.
Happy-Go-Wrong is an extraordinary feat of physical
storytelling about the intervening years and the future that actually lies
ahead for her. We watch Lucky skate and Andi run on the spot. Her impeccable physical
control shows her body contorting in discomfort and pain as the disease begins
to mess with her body and her mind.
The extraordinary thing about Happy-Go-Wrong, though,
is that while it’s specifically about Andi, it’s also about a wider world of
people suffering from invisible illnesses. People look at Andi, even knowing how
she struggles, and say “you look well” and “it’s good to see you smiling”. And you
wonder how often you might have patronised someone with a well-meaning
greeting, forgetting how complicated a person’s life may be.
“How are you” is a throwaway these days. People greet each
other with this instead of just saying hello. They say it without really
wondering how someone is – and Happy-Go-Wrong exposes the truth of this
microaggression.
Andi will make you laugh and cry and see her and the world a
little bit differently. She’s back on stage and that’s brilliant but it’s also
tough. Applaud her but remember that getting back on stage doesn’t mean
everything is okay. It seems like a step back to her old life but it’s really another
step forward, forging a path into a new world.
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