Reviews London TheatreOWE & Fringe Published 23 February 2016

Review: The Eulogy of Toby Peach at Vaults

The Vaults ⋄ 17th - 21st February 2016

“His mantra is a praise for life, a real eulogy.”

Brendan Macdonald
The Eulogy of Toby Peach at Vaults 2016.

The Eulogy of Toby Peach at Vaults 2016.

‘We may even get lost and be frozen by frost.
We may die in an earthquake or tremor.
Or nastier still, we may even be tossed
On the horns of a furious Dilemma.
‘But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill!
Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge!
Let’s go rolling and bowling and spinning until
We’re away from old Spiker and Sponge!”

I’m not sure if Toby Peach’s penchant for Roald Dahl’s story about a boy and some insects has to do with the likeness of his surname to their giant fuzzy vehicle, or if it’s just a sweet and juicy coincidence. Whatever the reason, James’s speech becomes Toby’s main mantra as he confronts his recent membership into what he calls the ‘not-so exclusive Cancer Club’.

As he goes through diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, remission, relapse, and recovery, Peach’s script reflects the sentiments of Dahl’s poem. Just as James blends a childish whimsicalness (‘We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted Scrunch who can chew up a man with one bite’) with a deep desperation for better days, Peach uses humour and imagination to escape from and cope with his own reality. His mantra is a praise for life, a real eulogy: what lies ahead might be exciting, fantastical, or utterly banal (a dilemma surely isn’t that furious), but it’s the rolling, the bowling, and the spinning that matters. It’s not just about moving away from something, but the mere act of moving.

This may be why Peach’s script is encoded with numerical indicators. Counting days, minutes, and chemo cocktails, Peach uses statistics to frame his own narrative and to measure significant moments in his life. But they also signify the movement of time and, through registering concrete events in the past, they affirm the continuing existence of the present. That present is Peach onstage, telling his audience of his real-life experience of an illness that affects 1 in 2 of us (another significant statistic).

Most of the time the show aims to be funny. Peach plays a sleezy Cancer Club spokesperson (elevator music included), and offers a punny homage to Sidney Farber in the form of a ‘Far Bar’, a one-stop shop for all cancer-treatment cordials. There’s also a trip to a sperm bank. While Peach’s humour isn’t entirely innovative, and occasionally the voice recordings are disjointing, it’s made effective by his wholehearted investment in every role he plays.

Which is all of them. Unlike other illnesses, cancer isn’t an alien bacteria or deadly virus invading and leeching off of its host. It is the unstoppable mutation of one’s own cells. It is its host. As Peach says, ‘cancer is you’. It’s a crucial observation; a real eulogy for Toby Peach must include paying tribute to his cancerous cells. What better way to dramatically represent living with the illness than to play all of its roles, to demonstrate the hard truth that combatting cancer is, to a certain extent, a battle within ourselves?

By the end of the hour-long monologue, however, Peach steers away from this thread and moves towards praising the science and innovation that made possible his recovery. He also celebrates his audience, and every British citizen who pays taxes and supports the NHS. ‘I’m here because of you’, he says. You can’t help but think of the current healthcare climate, with NHS cuts, the loss of bursaries for student nurses and midwives, and the junior doctors’ contract. What begins as a eulogy for Toby Peach ends as an ominous eulogy to the NHS, a celebration of a public healthcare system that is slowly being eroded away. There are things looming worse than Spiker and Sponge, worse than a giant rhinoceros, and it’s enough to hope that, if anything, stories like Toby Peach’s will help galvanize us and guide us away from these very real terrors.

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Brendan Macdonald is a contributor to Exeunt Magazine

Review: The Eulogy of Toby Peach at Vaults Show Info


Produced by Rosalyn Newbery

Directed by Rich Rusk (guest director)

Written by Toby Peach

Cast includes Toby Peach

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