There's a Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The philosophy is profound in its simplicity: the breakage and repair become part of the object's history, something to celebrate rather than disguise. The cracks, highlighted in precious metal, become the most beautiful part of the piece.

Watching Gaynor Young perform Beauty in the Broken, I kept returning to this image. Not just because Young herself uses kintsugi as the central metaphor for her story, but because watching her on stage feels like witnessing that ancient art in living form. Here is a woman who was shattered — literally, catastrophically — and who has painstakingly pieced herself back together with threads of gold.

For those unfamiliar with Young's story, it reads like something almost too dramatic for fiction. In 1989, while understudying the lead role in Camelot, she fell eighteen metres down an unguarded lift shaft. She survived, but the fall left her with devastating injuries, including permanent deafness and brain damage. Her miraculous recovery became the stuff of legend in South African theatre, documented in two previous one-woman shows. Now, twenty years after her last return to the stage, she's back with this new chapter.

What strikes me most about Beauty in the Broken is not the tragedy at its heart, but the light that radiates from it. Young's humour is sharp and self-deprecating, disarming the audience from the first moments. She invites us to laugh with her, not from a place of pity, but from genuine connection. There's whimsy in the way she recounts even the darkest moments, a refusal to let trauma have the final word. This isn't a show about suffering, it's a show about what comes after, about the stubborn, magnificent work of choosing to live fully in a world that looks nothing like the one you planned.

The storytelling itself is masterful. Young hasn't lost her theatrical instincts; if anything, they've been honed by hardship. She knows exactly when to pause, when to let silence speak, when to crack a joke to release the tension building in the room. These aren't just memories recounted, they're moments lived and relived with all the skill of someone who understands the architecture of a story. The emotional beats land with precision, and there were moments when I felt the entire audience holding its breath as one.

One of the most touching elements of the production was the presence of a prompt waiting in the wings — a gentle angel figure ready to help when Young lost her way. Far from being a distraction, this detail became deeply moving, a visible reminder of the support systems we all need, the hands that reach out when we stumble. It added a layer of vulnerability and honesty that made the show even more powerful.

But what will stay with me long after leaving the theatre is the mirror it holds up to our own lives. How often do we let small inconveniences derail our days? How much energy do we waste mourning the lives we thought we'd have instead of embracing the ones we're actually living? Young's journey offers a recalibration of perspective, a reminder of how much there is to be grateful for, even in the broken places.

This isn't a show of self-pity or even of triumph in the traditional sense. It's something more nuanced: a meditation on renewal, on the daily choice to reinvent yourself when everything familiar has been stripped away. Young speaks with profound honesty about what it means to rebuild a life from fragments, to find meaning in despair, to accept that the person you become after trauma is not the person you were before — and that this, too, can be beautiful.

There's also something radical in watching a performer with a significant disability command a stage with such presence and power. Young's story demolishes any notion that disability limits possibility. Instead, she shows us how it can open entirely new spheres of experience, new depths of understanding, new ways of connecting with the world and with ourselves. Her courage is in choosing, again and again, to show up fully in her own life.

Throughout the performance, I found myself thinking about all the ways we break in life. Not all of us fall eighteen metres, but we all face moments when our vision for the future shatters. Relationships end. Dreams die. Bodies fail us. Losses accumulate. And in those moments, we face a choice: do we hide the cracks, or do we repair ourselves with gold?

Gaynor Young has chosen gold. In doing so, she's created a show that is a testament to the human capacity for resilience, a love letter to the people who hold us together when we can't hold ourselves, and a gentle but insistent reminder that there is beauty in the broken, if we're brave enough to look for it. It's a show that meets you where you are and sends you home changed, carrying a little more light than you had before.

Beauty in the Broken is on at Theatre on the Square until the 5th of October. Get your tickets here.

Finding Gold in the Cracks: A Review of Beauty in the Broken

Between Two Worlds: A Review of Becoming Benno