JUST WHEN YOU think you’ve got your whole act together, you know something might jigger it all into disaster. It’s like when you manage to get to the post office to buy stamps, and lo and behold, there’s a madman there, shooting the life out of everyone. This is the kind of premise that informs Susan Miller’s autobiographical play, My Left Breast, performed by Shannon Esra at Theatre on the Square this week, and Mkwanazi Theatre at Kingsmead College, from 12 to 18 May.

And yes, as the title indicates, it is about breast cancer – and as dynamics in the audience on opening night revealed, can be quite triggering – but it is about so much more than that. For Susan, the protagonist, her mastectomy, her treatment, her coming to terms with her lopsidedness and everyone else’s gaze travelling to her chest when she tells them, is a tender part of the fabric of being alive.

My Left Breast, oddly resonant with the 1989 film My Left Foot directed by Jim Sheridan is an essay on how the sum of the parts can make an extraordinary whole, and sometimes it is a sum of absent parts that makes the magic all the richer.

It’s a funny, rollicking and oft sensitive (and occasionally raw) foray into the complexities of treatment – from chemotherapy to Tamoxifen, post mastectomy blues and clinically induced menopause – and how they leave you feeling, in your body and also your soul. It’s about sexuality and a pink suitcase which contains an unfinished manuscript. It’s about being a daughter to parents who nourished their dreams, and it’s about children and their candour and how one’s circle of loved ones responds to the diagnosis of “The Big C”, classically.

And indeed, much of My Left Breast is premised on cliches, but it is the candour of the writing, and of Esra’s encapsulation of the character herself, that gives you the kind of courage to get up and carry on. Cancer has been such a hot topic for so long in medical research fraternities as well as people’s lives that there will be many audience members with the same story in their hearts and histories, verified by the scars on their bodies. The upshot of this is the relatable humour.

Ultimately, you need to go away from this work holding onto the idea that a cancer diagnosis should be as much a thread in the multi-coloured tapestry of being alive in a complex world with a million variables, including rainstorms or heartbreaks, baseball games or sending one’s children to university. Of course, it’s a terrifying and redefining line drawn under one’s own sense of mortality, and it would be wrong to make light of it. While you don’t leave the show with an urge to sing about the sun coming out tomorrow, you leave it feeling a little lighter and perhaps a little less alone in the burden you might be carrying in your body. We’re all in this merry-go-round together, by dint of the fact that we’re still here in this world.  

• My Left Breast is written by Susan Miller and directed by Janet Baylis. Presented by Stephanie Weil and Tarryn Edwards, and featuring lighting design by Barry Strydom, it is performed by Shannon Esra, stage managed by Regina Dube assisted by Melidah Thakadu, with technical management by Loftus Mohale assisted by Reggie Mathebe. It is onstage at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until 11 May 2024, and then performs at the Mkwanazi Theatre, Kingsmead College in Melrose from 12 to 18 May 2024.