Skin. Jack Studio Theatre.

Writer and director Peter Todd’s Skin opens to the sound of soft country guitar. Two twenty-something sisters, Sadie, and Clara are shooting the breeze with Peroni and Doritos. Content with bitching about their friend’s failing relationship, the conversation turns to the mole Sadie has just had excised from her back. It could be melanoma. Sadie, we hear later on, spent her childhood feeling like she lives inside “suffocating skin”, so it is not much of a surprise what the biopsy results show. Stage 2 cancer. Things are about to change drastically in both siblings’ lives.

Skin sets Sadie’s (Juliette Imbert) stumbling attempts to come to terms with living with cancer against three relationships: her burgeoning bond with her much tougher sister Clara (Elise Busset), her interactions with what she experiences as a cold and unfeeling medical establishment, and her life at an often unsympathetic workplace. Of these three it is the personal connection between siblings that feels most effectively charted.

Imbert is great as the anxious, lonely, confounded Sadie, whose ever-worsening diagnosis haunts her every waking hour. “My body is trying to kill me” she says, but she does not want to be brave or stoic in response. What she wants is to feel alive; to feel like she is more than just a diseased body. Busset impresses too as the pushier Clara, whose determination to be there for her sister is complicated by the fear she too may carry a lethally defective gene.

Sadie feels as if the health services, embodied in the form of frosty, straight-talking Dr Kinsela (Leah O’Grady) and diffident radiologist (Proshanto Chanda) treat her as a problem rather than a person. A botched operation and a nurse’s flippant incompetence adds to her sense of alienation from the professionals. Todd explores Sadie’s emotional response to the hospital environment through a dance routine from choreographer Tiggy Jones, complete with twirling baton lights, mask-wearing MRI technicians, and eerie back projections. It is a contrivance that works well enough in its own terms but feels strangely at odds with the more naturalistic texture of the rest of the play.

Least convincing are the scenes at work. One suspects Sadie’s boorish, bullying, one-dimensional boss Simon (Cosimo Asvisio) would last about five minutes in a modern workplace before being hauled off to an employment tribunal. Caring, biscuit-munching, co-worker Jill (Am Wyckoff) is rather more convincing. Todd, still early in his career, is better known as an actor than a writer. Perhaps his experiences of the realities of humdrum, MeToo, office life are limited.

Writer and Director: Peter Todd