JUST over a year ago David Izod was told he had testicular cancer. For

most of 1994 he was in and out of hospital -- undergoing intensive

chemotherapy followed by major surgery -- and it is this experience, and

his reactions to it, that he explores in The Teratoma Show.

While musician Pete Williams provides an on-stage soundtrack (songs

and guitar) Izod describes, with honesty, insight, and humour, how

cancer invaded not just his body but his emotions and his entire

philosophy of life. It's a personal journey that has resonances for

everyone, since it takes in quite a few fears beyond the obvious one:

dying.

He captures, with a flourish of Hammer horror imagery, the unnerving

effect of clinical briskness on the novice patient. Shifts the fantasy

into chilling reality as he searches for words that will help us imagine

the awfulness of chemotherapy -- yet even here he finds ways of making

us laugh at the debilitating side effects of a treatment which in effect

poisons the entire system to kill off part of it.

He seeds hard fact into lively anecdote, provides significant

background information on testicular cancer and encouraging data on

effective cures. And he tells us about 18-year-old Rajeet, who was

admitted with a tumour the size of a small cauliflower in his scrotum .

. . and a life expectancy reduced to bits of borrowed time. It's the

diagnosis -- or lack of it -- which can kill more surely than the

disease itself.

There's real rage in this show -- Izod doesn't want to die, but he

certainly doesn't want to die from such a mindless, suicidal adversary

as cancer. And there's also great sincerity and gentleness -- as when he

lists the everyday pleasures he most yearns for in hospital or savours

the warmth of a sunlit convalescence he did not always believe he would

reach. This is a performance rooted in personal drama which is neither

self-indulgent, nor whiny with self-pity. Instead it amounts to a

celebration of the human spirit, a celebration of the joy of breathing

in and breathing out. Repeated tonight and at Paisley Arts Centre on

February 17. Pete Williams's music -- he was an original member of

Dexy's Midnight Runners -- is a treat in itself.