‘People who say … they’re perfectly fine [are] more insane than the rest of us.’
Sage words from comedian, interviewer and all round performer Ruby Wax, currently enjoying the most enduring of her three marriages and a recent graduate from Oxford University with a Masters in Cognitive Therapy. It’s appropriate, then, that Out of Her Mind is a playful exploration of that troubling subject, mental illness.
An expansion of her eight minute TED Global talk of 2012, the show has an informal air, akin to a therapy support group. As the audience enters the venue, Wax is already on stage, swinging in an office chair and steeping a teabag in its pot. She then yells to get everyone’s attention, and briefly explains where the concept for this show came from. Wax’s own relationship with mental illness has not been an easy one, and the absence of an appropriate support network was been the catalyst for much of her recent work. It’s fair to say Wax and her infamous flaming personality – matching her hair and lips – make the perfect host for an audience to be educated by.
A highlight of this pseudo-neuroscience presentation were Wax’s crude lessons – complete with illustrated diagrams – on being a married woman, which brought roars of laughter from both genders. Her home truths about ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ have never been more relevant, especially for the newest generation of feminist women who can, ‘at their own peril’, have it all, and Wax deftly illustrated how discussions about the ‘Black Dog’ needn’t be sad or deflating but can be enlightening, optimistic and funny.
From the springboard of these firsthand accounts, Wax leapt off into outlandish hilarity, though the show also ventured into more sobering territory at times, as Wax revealed that the neuroses of her youth, somewhat enabled by her Austrian migrant mother, were not taken as seriously as they should have been by the medical professionals of the day.
The 400-strong audience was evidently enchanted by these lessons on love, marriage, Twitter and brain mapping, so much so that they remained for Wax’s unadvertised Q&A session after the show. The sincerity of their questions and her good humour proved that the 90 minute show engaged, excited, and may even have enlightened people about an illness that can’t simply be remedied with the suggestion to ‘perk up’.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
Ruby Wax – Out of Her Mind
Forum Theatre & Melbourne Town Hall
28 March – 5 April
Melbourne International Comedy Festival
www.comedyfestival.com.au
27 March – 21 April
