“You have cancer.” Three words with the power to change a life completely. Devastating, disorienting and, depending on circumstances, filled with uncertainty. A moment that forces a person to reconsider who they are, what they value, and what lies ahead.
In that space, there are very few choices. The only real one is to keep going.
Writer and performer Jenny MacDonald knows that moment intimately. In 2016, at a peak in her career and on the verge of an international tour, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Instead of stages and audiences, her world became hospitals, appointments, and treatment.
For someone whose life revolves around storytelling, the instinct to observe remained.
“What I can do is observe this world. I can notice the characters, the sets, the situations and I can write about that,” she says.
What began as a personal coping mechanism, writing reflections in the evenings after days of treatment, slowly evolved into something more. Over time, those notes became the foundation of The Tightrope Walker, a solo performance that explores illness, recovery, and the fragile balance between the two.
In Ireland, that experience resonates widely. According to Breast Cancer Ireland, one in seven women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, with around 3,600 new cases annually. While the numbers are stark, they also reflect progress: survival rates have risen from 73% to 88% since 2012, pointing to both medical advances and a growing conversation around prevention, treatment and recovery.
From personal journals to shared experience
When MacDonald revisited her writing during treatment, she began to see the potential for connection beyond her own experience. The next step was testing that instinct: sharing the idea with trusted collaborators.
Director Joe Salvatore and sound designer Martha Knight joined the project, helping shape the material into a fully realised piece of theatre. From the initial experience to a finished production, the process took several years.
“The idea remained on a back burner somewhere in my brain and my heart. As creators, you can have a lot of ideas, but you know a piece needs to be done if it keeps coming back,” she says.
That distance allowed her to revisit the material from different emotional perspectives, capturing both the immediacy of illness and the reflection that comes with time. The result is a work that feels both deeply personal and widely relatable.
An unpredictable form for an unpredictable experience
The Tightrope Walker unfolds through an innovative structure that places the audience at the centre of the storytelling. Each night, the narrative is created live, as audience members are invited on stage to select numbers that determine the order of events.
“Then suddenly those papers get thrown and the air blows them in every direction. It’s chaotic. I wanted the set to look like it, and in the end, theatre is a meaning maker. What we are doing is putting some of those pieces of paper back together,” she says.
The format mirrors the experience of illness: the sudden loss of order, the randomness, and the effort to reconstruct meaning from fragments. The tone shifts constantly, moving between humour and grief, often within moments. No two performances are the same, and audiences frequently return to see how the story transforms.
“You are walking a tightrope between grief and gratitude. That image really stayed with me as a metaphor for illness,” MacDonald says.
Unlike a performer who trains for years, illness is a tightrope no one chooses. There is no rehearsal, no preparation; only the necessity to keep moving forward.
Art, grief, and connection
Through her work with the Irish Hospice Foundation, MacDonald began to understand creativity in a new way.
“As difficult as illness was, there was something about it that made all the clutter of life disappear. It was so consuming that I tapped into deeper love and gratitude, because I wasn’t concerned with inconsequential things.”
In hospital environments, where patients can feel reduced to diagnoses and numbers, creativity becomes a way back to identity; a means of reconnecting with thought, emotion, and humanity beyond the physical body, which can feel reduced to a malfunctioning machine.
The Tightrope Walker has been performed not only in theatres but also in healthcare settings, where it resonates deeply with those who recognise its world firsthand. MacDonald recalls one audience member who was initially hesitant to attend while undergoing cancer treatment, later saying that, for the first time, she felt she might be able to get through it.
Moments like that, MacDonald says, affirm the purpose of the work.
A shared human experience
While rooted in illness, The Tightrope Walker reaches far beyond it. Its themes of uncertainty, resilience, and emotional balance speak to anyone who has faced crisis in any form.
“Being human is a crazy story because we are capable of loving so much. And then there’s this reality of everything being impermanent,” MacDonald reflects.
The Tightrope Walker will be performed as part of the Galway Theatre Festival on 2 and 3 May at the O’Donoghue Theatre, with a post-show discussion on the final night.
For MacDonald, the hope is simple: that audiences leave inspired by their own stories and strength.
Because, as her work suggests, we are all, in one way or another, already walking the tightrope.
