Nicola Gunn and Ben Grant in The Eradication of Schizophrenia. Image: Ponch Hawkes
Inspired by a real-life revolutionary method of treating schizophrenia relying on dialogue rather than medication, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland conceived by British company Ridiculusmus is an ingenious representation of the experience of auditory hallucination. In our society, schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses are widely misunderstood and therefore feared and stigmatised. Before seeing this play last night, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to psychosis, much less actively wondered what it would be like to experience. This work is a compelling opportunity to imagine it.
The traverse stage is bisected by a simple representation of an interior wall, punctuated by curtained windows and a frosted glass door. Four performers array themselves, two on each side of the wall. They conduct intriguing and unsettling conversations, mostly in pairs (a troubled doctor and his patient; a mother and her young son), portraying distractedness, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, sudden anger. We can never be sure to whom or what they are really responding: the person standing in front of them? Bits of dialogue audible from the other side of the wall? Or something else entirely?
When the audience swaps seating banks after the intermission and hears in full the dialogue they missed in the first act, there is the feeling of some gaps being filled, some understanding achieved. At the same time, there is a deepened sensation of being surrounded by voices expressing an uncanny range of emotions and states of mind. You’re not sure what you should be listening to, which voice you ought to trust.
The performances are consistently assured and strong. The technique of overlapping dialogue is executed extremely well, occasionally achieving synchronicity, a bit like the visual metaphor of overlapping circles used to represent the separation of ‘my experience’ and ‘your experience.’
I thoroughly enjoyed the way the audience’s trust is manipulated: each character veers between plausible sanity and open instability, so while we strain to follow their speech, we never feel sure what to believe. Scenes in which unstable characters reject the pills pushed at them comment on our culture’s over-reliance on medication to manage mental illness. Indeed the whole play successfully provokes thinking and conversations about mental health, without resorting to earnestness.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland
Arts House, Meat Market
Written by: David Woods & Jon Haynes
Performers: Ben Grant, Nicola Gunn, Jon Haynes, David Woods
Set Designer: George Tomlinson
Lighting: Mischa Twitchin
Sound: Salvador Garza
12-16 November, 2014
