“I thought, ‘what would happen if I went on stage and just took my wig off?’ The reaction was quite big; people gasped and covered their mouths.”
Actor and writer Emily Glaze has alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition that causes sudden, patchy hair loss.
The 30-year-old from Telford started losing patches of hair at 16, before all of her hair fell out at 21, when she was in her final year of university.
“It’s not really what you imagine, going out into the world,” she said.
Glaze is now taking a one-woman show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, based on her experiences of living with alopecia.
The show Basic Bald B*tch, revolving around the fictional character of Amy, originally started as a 10-minute monologue which Glaze wrote for a scratch night – an opportunity for theatremakers to test short excerpts of works-in-progress – in 2021.
“For a really long time I felt so much shame about the subject of having alopecia,” Glaze said.
“I got to a point in my life where I was really done with having to hide all the time and I found a lot of empowerment in performance.”
She decided to go on stage at the scratch night and take her wig off, eliciting a powerful reaction from the audience.
“It was quite a shock for that performance. People would come up to me afterwards and have lovely positive things to say,” she said.