Storytelling across film, music and performance.
Production • Composition • Professional Voiceover
Creative work for broadcast / online, release and live audiences.
HALF THE MAN
Half the Man is a one-man theatre production created and performed by Michael Livesley, exploring transformation, resilience and identity through humour and storytelling.
Premiering at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, the show draws directly from Michael’s personal experience of losing half his body weight - and examines not only physical change, but the psychological, emotional and social realities that come with it.
Blending comedy, reflection and performance, the work sits somewhere between memoir, theatre and stand-up — a deeply personal story told with warmth, honesty and irreverence.
THE ORIGIN OF THE SHOW
For many years, there were effectively two versions of me — the big one, and the not-so-big one.
At my heaviest I weighed 25 stone. In 2018 I decided it was finally time to do something about it — and over the course of a year, I lost half my body weight.
Not wishing to waste a perfectly good storytelling opportunity, I turned the experience into a theatre show.
DEVELOPING THE WORK
What began as a personal challenge quickly became creative material. The experience of transformation — physical, emotional and psychological — was far too strange, difficult and occasionally absurd not to share.
The show grew into something that explored far more than weight loss. It became about identity, perception, habit and self-image — in short, a show about fear and fry-ups.
Humour proved essential. Without it, the story would have been unbearable. With it, the experience became something audiences could recognise — even if their own transformations had taken very different forms.
EDINBURGH FRINGE & RECEPTION
Half the Man premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, where it quickly found an audience.
The show received significant attention, including promotion by Fringe influencers, a major feature in Scotland’s national Sunday Post, and coverage by German national broadcaster ZDF.
Following Edinburgh, further performances helped shape and refine the production ahead of a planned UK tour.
THE TOUR THAT NEVER HAPPENED
A national tour was scheduled for Spring 2020.
As the world now knows, the live performance industry shut down in March 2020 due to Covid, and the tour was cancelled.
Like so many theatrical projects at that time, Half the Man was paused mid-journey — just as it was gathering momentum.
WHAT THE SHOW BECAME
Although the touring run was cut short, the experience of creating and performing Half the Man remains one of the most significant artistic projects of my career.
It was a show about transformation — but not just physical transformation. It was about fear, change, identity, and the strange experience of becoming someone new while still being recognisably yourself.
A show about fear and fry-ups, in other words.
And like all real transformations, the story doesn’t really end. It simply continues — in different forms, on different stages, and in the work that followed.
That was always the story, really.
Sometimes you have to lose it all to find yourself.