2 days ago
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As someone committed to my craft, I’ve always believed that the show must go on. An accident in my second year of university took it to new extremes. It was the Exeter University theatre society’s annual play at the Edinburgh fringe and I’d landed the part of Cassius in Julius Caesar. The director decided that instead of killing himself, Cassius would die during a choreographed fight with his rival, Mark Antony. We also chose to use real knives, which sounds absurd, but we wanted to be authentic. The plan was for the actor playing Antony to grab my arm as I held the knife, and pretend to push it behind my back. We must have rehearsed the sequence 50 times.
We were about halfway through our month-long run, performing to a decently sized audience. Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong.
There was a sharp piercing feeling. The knife was supposed to have been quietly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.
As everything went black before another scene came on, I pulled out the knife. That was when my heart started to race. Feeling strangely clear-headed, I rushed off stage into the foyer, my left leg going numb. I told the venue workers to call an ambulance. There was still a quarter of the play to go, and the performance continued, the audience and cast blissfully unaware. Even now, I don’t know what happened to the knife.
The police showed up, then the paramedics. I have no recollection of the journey to the hospital. My clearest memory is being face down in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors and nurses. I remember going into an MRI scan and giggling as they removed my nipple piercings. Looking back, it was clear I was in shock. It turns out the blade had gone 7.8cm deep in my back. It had partially severed a nerve in my spinal cord and missed my aorta by about a centimetre. When a doctor told me I’d come close to dying, and that the play had to stop using real knives, I remember thinking: “You just don’t understand theatre.”
The director called my parents, who came up to Edinburgh to be with me as I recovered. I also got a call from the chair of the university theatre company asking if I intended to take legal action. It hadn’t crossed my mind: I probably thought it would be uncool.
After taking a week off from the show, I went back to the venue to speak to the cast. People were really upset for me. I felt overwhelmed with emotion. I ran out of the theatre, collapsed on to the pavement and started sobbing. I was filled with this sense that I shouldn’t be alive.
About a year afterwards, I had a call from the doctor who had worked on me. He had written an article about the injury in a medical journal: it was called A Hit, a Palpable Hit. When I read it, I finally understood the gravity of what had happened to me. Then I didn’t talk about it for 10 or 15 years. Every now and then I’d feel a shudder, a sense that I shouldn’t be alive.
If you look closely, you can see a tiny scar on my spine. The numbness in my leg has never gone away, but luckily it doesn’t affect my everyday life. Eighteen years later, I’m not as scared of death as I was, and I’m comfortable talking about what happened.
I still work in theatre: I write and perform, and am a co-artistic director of a community storytelling organisation. Last year, I even went back to the venue to perform during the fringe. In my current show, the main character comes across a stabbing victim. For all I went through, getting stabbed on stage never put me off theatre – it confirmed my love for it. The privilege of performing never fails to excite me, but I’m super conscious of safety nowadays.
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One good thing did come out of all of this: the person who phoned me from the university theatre company is now my wife, and we have two children together. It’s just as well I didn’t sue.
As told to Chiara Wilkinson
Olly Hawes’ Old Fat F**k Up is at Riverside Studios, London, to 20 December 2025
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