Experience: I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while holding Julius Caesar | Life and Style

AS Another dedication to My art, I always believe that this show must go on. Tradition in my second year of university took it to the new. It was Exery Assey's annual univesion at the Edinburgh Gringe and I got to kiss Julius Caesar. The director decided that instead of killing himself, Cassaus would die during the battle filmed by his friend, Mark Antony. We also chose to use real knives, which sounds silly, but we wanted to be zeni-zeni. The plan was for the actor playing Antony to hold my arm while I held the knife, pretending to push it behind me. We should also repeat it regularly 50 times.

We were about to enter our period, acting inappropriately. After we put on our clothes, and the stage was still and moody, we started the fight as usual. Then something went wrong.

There was a sense of entrance. The knife should have gone silently past me – instead, it had gone behind me. I realized how it happened when we were dealing with the death of my person, I thought: I have to get here until the lights go down.

As everything went black before another scene, I pulled out a knife. This is when my heart started racing. Feeling a strange headache, I ran partway into the foyer, my left leg going. I told the staff who called an ambulance. There was a quarter section to go, and the performance continued, the audience and the change without realizing it. Even now, I don't know what happened to the knife.

The police showed up, then the medics. I don't have to go back to the hospital. My vivid memory is meeting a leather couch, and doctors and nurses. I remember going to the Mri Scan and shaking when they removed my nipple piercing. Looking back, it made sense. When it arrived the blade was 7.8cm deep in my back. It slightly damaged the nerves in my spine and missed my aorta by about a centimeter. When the doctor told me that I was close to death, and that the play had to stop using real knives, I remember thinking: “You just don't understand theater.”

My parents' guardian, who came to Edinburgh to be with me during my recovery. I also got a call from the chair of the university's theater company asking if I wanted to take legal action. It didn't blow my mind: maybe I thought it would be imperfect.

As soon as I left the show, I went back to the area it spoke to. People hurt me a lot because of me. I felt so good. I ended up in the theater, collapsed on the sidewalk and started crying. I was fed up with this that I shouldn't be alive.

About a year later, I got a call from the doctor who worked for me. He wrote an article about injury in a medical book: It's called a hit, a hit. After reading it, I understood the magnitude of what happened to me. Then I didn't talk about 10 or 15 years. Every now and then I feel that I don't deserve to live.

If you look closely, you can see a small scar on my back. The numbness in my leg never went away, but luckily it doesn't interfere with my daily life. Eight years later, I'm not as scared to die as I was comfortable talking about what happened.

I still work in theater: I write and act, and I am the artistic director of the community organization Commenting. Last year, I went back to the fringe park. Of mine current displaythe main character meets the villain. For all my experiences, being beaten on stage and not taking away from the theater – it confirmed my love for it. The opportunity to do this never fails to excite me, but I know more these days.

One of the best things came out of all this: the person who called me at the theater university is my wife, and we have two children together. It's so good I'm not sue.

Narrated by Chiara Wilkinson

Olly Haws' Old Fat F**K up is at Riverside Studios, London, until 20 December 2025

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