How Can A Body Withstand This?

A powerful solo theatre show exploring grief, abortion, and the stories imposed on women's bodies. When her best friend's medical crisis becomes a national abortion headline in America, one woman retraces the days that led there, determined to reclaim the person at the centre of the story.

Set against the immediate overturning of Roe v. Wade, How Can a Body Withstand This? follows a woman as she revisits the events surrounding her best friend's medical emergency in Tennessee. What begins as an attempt to understand a deeply personal loss gradually widens into an exploration of the histories, beliefs and contradictions that continue to shape reproductive healthcare in the United States.

Drawing on memories of growing up in the American South, hospitals, friendship and care, the play interrogates not only what happened in this particular instance, but how America arrived at this moment -- and what it means to love a place, and the people who raised you, when you fear they may also be making the world worse.

Years later, now living in London, she finds herself questioning the distance we place between ourselves and the upheaval, loss and political change we watch unfold from afar. Ultimately, How Can a Body Withstand This? asks audiences to confront abortion not as an abstract debate, but as a human experience, and to consider how often the complexities of other people's lives are closer to our own than we care to admit.

Developed through a commission at the 2026 MishMash Festival.

Written and performed by Mimi Harlow Robinson.