Gutted – HOME

Watching Liz Richardson in ‘Gutted’ puts me in mind of that old Roberta Flack classic: “Killing me softly with his song, telling my whole life with his words …” In a performance which is both subtle and brutally frank, Liz tells the story of her personal experience with ulcerative colitis – all of which feels horribly familiar to me, having myself been a victim of this disease a couple of decades ago.

The stage is set with three toilet bowls, from which, at various points, Liz extracts pro-biotic yoghurts: ‘good for the gut,’ she is told – as if they could halt the progression of this relentless disease. She presents her story largely through the voices of people she knows or meets – friends, relations, colleagues, nurses, strangers. With gentle humour and an extraordinary lightness of touch, she charts the life-disrupting hospital stays, the endless indignities, the pain, the shame…