The Wheelchair on my Face

Imagine making friends without being able to see facial expressions; imagine trying to learn in school without being able to see the board; imagine playing tennis without being able to see the player on the other side of the net, let alone the ball. Imagine all this and then being only seven years old. In her one-person show Kelly recalls, with an admirable lack of self-pity, how as a child growing up in Ireland she suffered from such extreme undetected myopia that she could scarcely see further than the nose in front of her face.

One would have to be hard-hearted not to end up rooting for the tough little seven year-old self that Kelly renders so vividly, or to share her delight at the brave new world that opened up for her on getting her first pair of glasses. Kelly is immensely likeable as a narrator and her background as a comedienne stands her in good stead. Without the leaven of humour a story with such a fairytale ending could easily become saccharine. 

The great Russian formalist critic, Victor Shlovsky, argued that poetry was the practice of making the familiar unfamiliar, in other words seeing everyday things with fresh eyes. Kelly’s memoir embodies Shlovsky’s dictum in the most vital of ways. Not only does her prose make fresh the world for the audience by allowing us to see it anew through the eyes of a child, but through the eyes of a child for whom seeing even the most mundane of everyday objects felt like a minor miracle.