My Shrinking Life @ Tron

Twelve years ago, celebrated Scottish actor Alison Peebles was diagnosed with the degenerative condition multiple sclerosis. This unsparing show for the National Theatre of Scotland deals through semi-autobiographical monologue, dance and physical theatre with Alison's experiences and responses to the illness.

"Theatre is both artifice and reality," states Peebles at the start: as she takes the audience through the stages of the condition, from denial to acceptance, the theatricality is placed within a gauzy curtained glass partition, filled with kitsch/glam trinkets and clothes, wherein the 50s housewife paradigm of femininity resides, in the shapely form of dancer Katie Armstrong – blank, serene and submissive – (at first, anyway) juxtaposed with the clinical confines of a crumbling hospital ward.

Soon the perfect veneer cracks; Armstrong is krumping like an R'n'B diva, before malfunctioning and breaking down like an automaton, then screaming like a toddler, as Peebles watches, impassively sucking a lollipop. Armstrong is joined by the other three cast members: Amy Gallagher representing Peebles as a child; Hanna Stanbridge as the wannabe actor, wrestling with her own issues of body image; and male dancer Thomas J Baylis, who dons Peebles' red sequinned dress, all goading Peebles with youthful vitality and beauty; all facets of her frustration and anger.

Peebles herself is funny, honest and heartbreaking, her eyes steely and her gaze focused, railing against her body's unwillingness to do what her mind asks of it.

Through the mounting intensity of the piece, My Shrinking Life forces us to confront human fragility – a raw, blackly humorous and profound work which never compomises nor sugar coats, scrutinising emotionally manipulative charities, well-meaning strangers, the effects of MS on the body and the brutal fact that disease cares not for status.