Life With Herpes: First Symptoms | Rebel Star

All images: Landon Smith Photography

Rebel Star’s new work, Life With Herpes: First Symptoms, is deeply personal, delightfully silly, and surprisingly educational. Her work-in-progress showing at Pip Theatre (as part of Melt Festival) showed great promise as a unique work that does an educational service to the public, while promising and delivering quirky comedy that gets people through the door and engaged in the message. 

Life With Herpes: First Symptoms explores Rebel’s own dark circumstances around contracting herpes, and their experiences navigating both the symptoms of the condition and the reactions of those around them. Herpes is a fairly recent addition to Rebel’s life, and I really applaud her for taking such a fresh pain and thoughtfully using it to create something good and helpful. It would be easy (and justified) for Rebel to lean into devastation, but she has instead chosen to take control of this moment in her life and use comedy as a vehicle to keep people interested, laughing, and actually absorbing what she has to say about a serious topic. 

This work was very personal, but the inclusion of others' voices—from street interviews, to survey responses from other people living with herpes, and retellings of the reactions from friends and professionals—paints a larger picture of the social stigma endured by the surprisingly high number of people (1 in 8!) who live with the disease. 

The show has the casual, conversational nature of good stand-up, mixed with movement and music. During the show, Rebel tells personal stories about her diagnosis, teaches the audience about genital herpes/HSV2 using the much-loved PowerPoint presentation format, shows prerecorded skits and interviews, and sings herpes-themed parodies of well-known tunes. Rebel has a fantastic voice and is a strong vocal performer. They still maintain the fun of the show during the musical numbers, and the feeling of these moments lands charmingly somewhere between sincere performance and the experience of watching your friend perfectly recite all the words to a Weird-Al song during a car ride. 

All images: Landon Smith Photography

At this stage, the different segments of the show sometimes feel a little disconnected, moving somewhat-choppily between ideas. However, this was a work-in-progress showing, and with more time in front of audiences I’m confident that these small bumps will smooth out. 

Life With Herpes: First Symptoms is the perfect kind of show for a fringe festival, and I look forward to seeing Rebel further develop this work and find her audience. The show strikes a good balance between campy fun and genuinely educational content. I feel like I learned a lot that I didn’t know before about HSV2 and the stigmas surrounding it, and got to see a comedic and heartfelt new work.

Life With Herpes: First Symptoms played at Pip Theatre on Friday 31st of October 2025.