Making it Personal – using theatre to engage the public with genetics research
30 June 2025
Dr Alison Kay
What happens when cutting-edge science meets the raw honesty of the stage? Making it Personal explores this intersection, in which a couple's emotional journey after a serious genetic diagnosis in their child unfolds not in a lab, but under the spotlights of a theatre.
At its heart, this innovative public engagement project asks a deeply human question: Could it happen again? Using theatre as a storytelling tool, it brings to life the emotional impact of genetic uncertainty, risk, and the decisions families face, while explaining de novo (new) mutations in an accessible way.
The project was a collaboration of arts and sciences, designed and led by iPREGCARE study researcher and Centre of Personalised Medicine JRF Dr. Ali Kay and Dr. Minna Jeffery, theatre maker and Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Theatre, St Anne’s College, Oxford.
“Theatre offered us a unique platform to ‘set the scene’ on an emotional level, highlighting how individuals process risk and medical information—often in ways that differ significantly from clinical perspectives.”
The team spent several months developing a script with a panel of lived experience experts and healthcare practitioners. A staged reading took place on 17 May 2025 in the MOLT Theatre, St Anne’s College. The performance was filmed by Oxford Digital Media and is available via the CPM website and YouTube channel for use by medical practitioners worldwide.
After the performance, audience members explained how powerful and different it felt to learn about research through live theatre:
“Creative expression of research findings helps to put them in a human context…”
“I thought it triggered a new understanding in my heart.”
One of the most striking endorsements came from a viewer who had lived through the experience herself:
“There was something very poetic for me as I sat and watched it with my husband and four-week-old baby having been through the journey that Jess and Sam so beautifully acted out very recently. At the end, my husband turned and said that it was spot on and it felt like watching our story play out on stage and it captured the complexity of the situation”.
