MIKE Chapman is a stand-up in the working men's club tradition, and tonight he's playing the Playhouse Comedy Club in a Leeds pub.
His 17-year-old daughter, Becky, is taking her first steps as a singer, good enough for the bright lights, but what happens next is no laughing matter.
Becky (Skipton-born Elaine Glover) is struck with Creutzfeld Jakobs Disease (CJD), or mad cow disease, as it is easier to say, but no easier to digest.
This is a fictional story, but Rachael McGill's play came out of a conversation between director Ruth Carney and Stephen Forber, a former comedian on the northern club circuit, whose daughter, Rachel, died in 2001 at 21, a victim of nvCJD.
The Lemon Princess - the title is derived from the name Forber gave his daughter when her treatment turned her skin yellow - interweaves two main settings. The first charts Becky's decline from 1995 to 1996 and the forlorn fight of her father (Ian Reddington) against this incurable disease, and the slow march of medical progress in both Britain and America. The second is a documentary strand in the manner of David Hare's railway play The Permanent Way, with sequences of exchanges lifted directly from the Government inquiry into BSE and the link between nvCJD and eating infected beef. The cast switches from family members to inquiry participants in the blink of an eye in Carney's world premiere to provide seamless progression.
McGill's brittle yet sensitively humorous play is part kitchen-sink story of a very British family and part bitter chill of a very British political cover-up.
On the one hand, there is Mike Chapman's desperate urgency for any help on both sides of the Atlantic; on the other there is government inertia.
In the middle is Becky, turning alarmingly quickly from club-loving, cheeky Yorkshire lass with a headache, to a girl unable to walk or talk on her death bed, as her nine-year-old sister, Charlie (the heart-rending Samantha Robinson), tries to comprehend what's happening.
Anger, more than tragedy, courses through both McGill's play and Reddington's impassioned central performance, while Glover announces the arrival of a new Yorkshire talent.
Don't miss this beauty and the beast.
Box office: 0113 213 7700.
Updated: 11:31 Wednesday, February 16, 2005
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