Jackie Hagan is a multi-award-winning poet, playwright and performer who became a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellow in 2018 and was nominated for a Women of the World award for effecting social change using spoken word. She has worked extensively for the British Council, represented the UK in slam poetry in Rio de Janeiro, and was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary short. Jackie has won Saboteur Awards’ Best Spoken Word Show twice, is a Creative Future Literary Award winner, and regularly crops up on BBC Ouch! and BBC Radio 4.

WINNER Best Spoken Word Show, Saboteur Awards 2015
WINNER Creative Future Literary Award 2015

In April 2013 Jackie Hagan was commissioned to write a solo show. The following month she was unexpectedly admitted to hospital with a very painful foot. Four months later she left hospital with one less leg and loads more maturity.
Along the way she also fell in love, found her Dad and made friends with an old woman who looked like a threadbare tennis ball (with eyes).
This book is the script of the show, a poetic comedy with daftness and depth.

"A unique and utterly compelling performer. With wit and charm, she manages to make us laugh in the face of adversity." - Matt Fenton, Artistic Director, Contact Theatre

"Jackie Hagan boldly goes where no one even knows it's possible to go. Then gets the bus back home eating chips on the top deck."- Jo Warburton, poet

"Heartfelt, hilarious and slightly eccentric." - The Skinny

"If Jackie is available to run a workshop for you, book her - she's brilliant, creative, inclusive, inspiring, compassionate and inventive. In twenty years I can't say I've known anyone run better workshops." - Pete Kalu, Artistic Director, Commonword

"A powerful story told with wit... without a trace of self-pity." - Manchester Theatre Awards

"Poetic, playful [and] psychologically astute." - Sabotage Reviews

Jackie on Channel 4.

Jackie Hagan - Some People Have Too Many Legs from ContactMCR on Vimeo.

Introduction
from Some People Have Too Many Legs © Jackie Hagan, 2015

In 2013 I got sick and brought down the national average number of legs, then I did a show about it.

So, without giving away too much (seeing as you are about to read the story), this is what happened: two years ago I got a commission to write a show, and then a month later I went into hospital over the road from the theatre, while I was in there I wrote about what was going on, I lost my flat when I came out because I was in a wheelchair and my flat was very high up in the sky without a lift, so while I was making and touring the show I was off my head on morphine and trauma. It won a couple of awards (I'm totally showing off now, we've gone from X-factor sob story to 'aren't I great' with only a full stop to give us order) and I went round selling my story to those sort of magazines your mum reads on the toilet, and now it's now. So it's been a mental two years. Somehow during all that I sort of forgot to mention in the show that I'm bisexual and bipolar; I used to make a lot of work about that, and getting people to be accepting about that stuff is dead important to me. I thought about muddying up the narrative by sticking that stuff in, but instead I've stuck on a couple of poems at the start. Job's a good 'un.

The most common question people ask me is Why did you have your leg off? I don't answer this fully in the show because I don't know the answer and neither do the doctors. I have something called Systemic Sclerosis, but that doesn't make you lose your leg. I also have something called Raynaud's Syndrome, but to lose your leg from that is pretty rare. I also have Fuch's Syndrome, but that has nothing to do with legs (but is more fun to tell people you have). What we know is that I had a sudden, very large cluster of blood clots in the main artery in my leg. The moment this happened is the moment of mystery; there was a spasm, that is it, a mystery spasm. Scary, isn't it. So I have embraced uncertainty, eat more veg, and appreciate what I have, because you never know what's round the corner (it could be an old lady who looks like a threadbare tennis ball).

Pull aside a jam-stained coat or a frilly nightgown in the dark and dazzling jumble and enter a secret, magical world of drunken carebears and narky buses; a world where wisdom is biro'd on the back of everyone's hand, where clowns eat spam, sugar and lard butties, and where if you stand outside Netto for long enough a rocketship will come and fly you away.
Come in and meet Cat Diazepam, Bobby Bookshop, Veronica Pop, Mr Pinstripe and their friends and find out who brought Bambi's mum back to life, in Jackie's incredible collection of contemporary adult folklore.

Cover & illustrations by Brink.

Flapjack Press: exploring the synergy between performance and the page.