LONDON CITY NIGHTS: mental illness

Friday, May 18, 2018

Review: 'In The Shadow Of The Mountain' at the Old Red Lion, 17th May 2018

Friday, May 18, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating:

I have two ambitions for this review. I want to be humane and I want to be efficient. In The Shadow Of The Mountain was created with the best of intentions: to address the stigma and misconceptions surrounding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It fails to do this. More prosaically, it is not a very good play.

The plot concerns the relationship between Ellie (Felicity Huxley-Miners, also writing) and Rob (David Shears). They 'meet-cute' on a train platform when Ellie hurls herself at Rob after she suspects that he's suicidal. Though Rob is annoyed and confused, he follows her home after she offers him casual sex. Ellie's behaviour grows more bizarre once we're at her flat, with a very confused Rob spending the rest of the 70-minute play dealing with her rapid mood swings, impulsive behaviour and emotional manipulation.

There are multiple reasons why In The Shadow Of The Mountain fails to achieve what it wants to do. To be precise, in the words of the playwright, the goal was to kick back against "...portraying women with BPD as difficult and deliberately manipulating ... All of this contributes to the harmful, negative portrayal and is so damaging to both those affected and those with little personal experience."

If this was the aim then the play has catastrophically failed. Ellie is written, played and directed as the villain of the piece, objectively shown to be deliberately manipulative to Rob. It's bizarre that the play claims it is pushing back against harmful stereotypes of mental illness at the exact same time it is leaning into them as hard as possible. The tone of the piece is so skewiff that after the ominous first couple of scenes I assumed we were heading into outright horror territory, and that Rob would soon find himself shoved into a sack and dismembered, Audition-style.

This happens because the audience only sees Ellie via Rob. We get to know her as he does, and his lack of comprehension of her mental situation means that we're forever on the outside looking in. If the aim of the play is to show empathy with someone with BPD we need to understand her internal processes and see the situation from her perspective, which this play cannot achieve by virtue of its structure.

Granted, In The Shadow Of The Mountain would be a much more difficult play to write if it were told from Ellie's perspective, but it's not impossible. For example, Rachel Bloom's CW sitcom Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is about the protagonist's BPD, and that manages to present the illness accurately and humanely while delivering a series of toe-tappin' musical numbers (read more in this excellent Elle article).

Compounding all of this are two unconvincing performances. Huxley-Miner's Ellie spends large swathes of the play acting like a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl ("MPDGs are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (most often brooding or depressed) male protagonist.") while David Shears' Rob is barely a character and more a collection of perplexed stares. Then there's the lacklustre set and...

Y'know what I just feel bad now. It's one thing to stick the boot into a production ruined by ego or stupidity, it's another to do it to a play obviously written with good intentions that has gone completely awry. I wish I had nicer things to say about In The Shadow Of The Mountain - but, well, I don't.

In The Shadow Of The Mountain is at the Old Red Lion until 2nd June. Tickets here.

Friday, February 19, 2016

'One Under' at the Vault Festival, 18th February 2016

Friday, February 19, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Mental illness is no laughing matter.

Well, not usually.

One Under is a one woman comedy show by Amy Fleming that explores attitudes to mental illness. Equal parts social experiment/personal catharsis/ersatz game show, the hour long piece sets out to understand what makes us tick.

Fleming, a graduate in Molecular Medicine, approaches her subject with a pleasantly thorough faux-scientific rigour. At various times we're quizzed as to whether certain quotes indicate mental illness, given a broad outline of genetics and epigenetics and gently guided through ways of dealing with the onset of crippling depression.

Large chunks of the show are autobiographical. Fleming explains that the key event in her childhood was her father's suicide, an event that's reverberated throughout her entire life. Binding this together with her knowledge of biology, she ponders whether she's inherited her father's genetic predisposition for depression.

In candid tones she reveals the existence of her mental 'bully'; that weaselly, nagging voice at in the back of your head whispering that your efforts are doomed to failure (just like always). She asks whether a flirtation with suicide is really that worrying, tells us about her teenage crying jags and, most uncomfortably, simulates a performance nightmare, including a shameful muttered apology to her Mum.

Right now you're probably thinking that this sounds like a complete and utter downer. Well it isn't - Fleming is like a top chef when it comes to maintaining a balance in her dish. Sure you get a teaspoon of uncomfortable confession here, a pinch of tragedy there, but they're leavened with big heaping dollops of straightforwardly charming comedy.

Fleming quickly proves a charismatic and entertaining host, effortlessly corralling her audience exactly where she wants them. It's a bit risky to have a 'serious' show with large amounts of audience interaction - you only need one drunken loudmouth for things to go seriously off-piste. But Fleming knows what she's doing - keeping us so entertained and avoiding excessive preaching.

Awareness of the scope and seriousness of mental illness is an important topic and Fleming does such a good job of communicating her experiences with it that any criticism feels a touch churlish. Nonetheless, the game show sequences of the show are a little bit scrappy; with the audience occasionally mildly perplexed about what we're being asked or what we're trying to achieve.

I get that the gameshow format is merely the cream cracker on which the delicious brie of mental illness awareness is layered, but it stands out as an area that could be tightened up a smidge.

But hey, this is good stuff. I'm often a bit wary of shows that approach depressing subjects with irreverent humour - in my experience cutesey tweeness is never far away. So it's to Fleming's credit that she excises every last trace of "hippy dippy wanky bullshit". She leaves the stage for us to ponder a marvellously poignant image - an animated CT scan of her brain.

A great finale, though it means she doesn't get a proper round of applause.

She deserves one.

★★★★

One Under is at the Vault Festival until 21st February. Details and tickets here.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ (2012) directed by David O. Russell, 18th November 2012

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a film about mental illness. We follow the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), sufferer of a bipolar disorder. As the film opens he's being released from a state mental institution after serving a sentence for violently beating someone half to death. He suffers from intense mood swings, turning on a knife edge from happy and upbeat to depressive and violent.

David O. Russell has created a film that pulls itself in two directions at once. It’s obviously striving to present an accurate and sympathetic view of various types of mental disorder but is shackled to the conventions of the romantic comedy. These two ‘genres’ (if ‘mental illness film’ is really a genre) sit uneasily together.

Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper)

The narrative shows us Pat’s attempts to conquer his condition and reintegrate himself into a society that’s suspicious and scared of him. They’re scared of him with good reason though, he lacks a filter on his words and actions, frequently acting inappropriately and with no empathy for how he might come across to others. While he’s constantly feeling some kind of extreme emotion, he entirely lacks the apparatus to identify how he’s affecting those around him. He’ll burst into his parent’s bedroom late at night to rant about Ernest Hemingway and throw a book through the window, or run up and hug a visibly frightened ex-colleague.

Pat is not the most likeable filmic hero. Throughout the film he operates under the illusion that he’s going to get his marriage back together, which everyone around him can immediately tell is not going to happen. People try to let him down gently and get him to see that his wife probably isn’t coming back. He labours under the illusion that their love is unbreakable, even after she’s had an affair and he’s nearly beaten a man to death in front of her.

Pat's parents, Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro)

Into this tangled world comes the equally complicated Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s a recent widow and ever since her husband died has been undergoing an alienating nymphomania. To the obvious disgust and embarrassment of her family she’s been having sex with nearly everybody she comes across. It’s gotten to the point where she’s been fired from her job for sleeping with everyone in the office. So can these two damaged people come together and help each other with their problems?

But it’s not just our two leads that are suffering psychic pains. One of the points the film makes is that the dividing line between those that are diagnosed mentally atypical and those that appear to lead normal lives is blurred. Nearly every character in the film appears to be dealing with some kind of problem, be it an obsessive compulsive disorder, violent fits of rage or a hidden depression. Russell is much more sympathetic to those like Pat and Tiffany who are honest enough to recognise their own problems and has a deep respect for the methods they use to try and fix themselves.

also Chris Tucker is in this film.

Both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have raging internal storms constantly bubbling behind their performances. They’re portraying people that are not only volatile, but to some degree also have the knowledge that they can ‘get away with it’. The two have both been damaged in some way, so both have an 'excuse' for their actions. One of Cooper’s best tactics is to use his wide, bright blue eyes to show Pat's terrifying clearness and confidence in his actions. The disconnect between how sure he is that his course is the right one and what we in the audience know to be true makes him both tragic and fairly frightening. Cooper is confident in a difficult role, and in less skilled hands runs a risk of losing audience sympathy altogether.

Lawrence is a good match for him, her and Cooper bounce off each other realistically and reflexively. She doesn’t have quite as many emotional gears to shift into as he does, but this is more of a function of her character rather than a limitation in her performance. What she does fantastically is the transformation from reserved, cool and collected to towering, violent, frustrated rage. There’s a physical change that comes over her in one scene that’s a marvel to behold, it’s like suddenly there’s a completely different person that’s sprung out of the character.

The world that these two inhabit is as carefully constructed as the two central characters. Due to their mental states, both Pat and Tiffany live and are dependant on their parents. Russell takes the same kind of downbeat look at working class American life as he did in ‘The Fighter’, although with a slightly softer touch. The film takes place in an overcast suburbia, row after row of identical houses, identical streets and nosy neighbours. This endless downtrodden domestic conformity gets to you after a while, but does the job of making our leads stand out like sore thumbs.

It’s clear that everyone involved here is sincere in making a film that aims to educate us about what it is like suffering from or living with a person with a mental disorder. The characters are treated with nothing but dignity, even in their most unsympathetic moments we at least understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Despite this, the film does use the pretty lame cliche of saying ‘maybe the ones who’ve been diagnosed with mental illness are actually the sane ones?’

This film has genuine flashes of complexity, and when it resorts to cliché like this it falls flat. Russell goes some way to justify this by making nearly every other character in the film a bubbling pit of vague symptoms, but this ends up feeling like a clever way to dodge the point. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ doesn’t exactly glamorise mental illness, but that fact that it propels the central love story means some of the rough edges are necessarily sanded down.

For the vast majority of the running time ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a downbeat, bittersweet indie drama. The last quarter of the film feels like it’s been parachuted in from a glossy, conventional romantic comedy. Suddenly these damaged characters that we’ve gotten to know are acting relatively normally, and the focus shifts not onto whether they’re healing mentally, but bizarrely, onto their dancing skills. The argument the film puts forward is that their dancing skills are directly linked to their mental health, but after treading so carefully on this territory for the first 90 minutes it becomes very clumsy, very fast.

It’s a let down. We have it impressed upon us that this is an impossibly complex situation with no easy solutions, but the film takes a tonal swerve, shows us that actually there are easy solutions and ties everything up in a neat little bow. A happy ending and roll credits.

Other criticisms include the fact that this film assumes you have a knowledge of American Football, and specifically know a vague history of the Philadelphia Eagles. Characters repeatedly reference events in the history of this team, which may be common knowledge in the US, but I’ve got no idea what the hell they’re talking about and there’s not enough context to figure it out.

The climax of the film involves a ridiculously complex bet on which all the emotional and financial woes of our characters rest. The set up for this bet is one of the most interminable and confusing scenes I’ve seen in a film lately, and assumes you’ve got a knowledge of both American Football and US betting lingo. There’s a protracted negotiation of ‘points’ on a bet and just when this is decided, the characters begin discussing transforming the already complex bet into a parlay (I didn’t know what this was). To be fair they include a clumsy bit of exposition after the scene is over that translates it all into plain English, but it’s too little too late. If the audience is watching the set up to the big climax and they don’t know what the hell anyone is talking about, it saps urgency from the film and replaces it with alienation and confusion.

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ for the most part is an achingly sincere film that clearly cares a great deal about its subject matter. It’s got a solid core of talent and some deftly and sensitively sketched characterisation. But it can’t work out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an serious indie drama about mental illness or a conventional rom-com with two sweet, attractive leads? By trying to do both it doesn’t succeed at either.

‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is on general release from 21^st November 2012

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

‘Bedlam’ at the Old Vic Tunnels, 21st October 201

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

If your goal is to create a space that fills visitors with unease and transports them away from the modern world then you can’t pick a much better place in London than the Old Vic Tunnels. I seem to be a regular here these days, this is the third time in three months I've been here attending something or other. ‘Bedlam’ is the third in a series of art events run by the Lazarides Gallery, being preceded by ‘Hells Half Acre’ in 2010 and ‘The Minotaur’ in 2011, neither of which I attended. The concept here is to portray a ‘world gone mad’, an overwhelmingly sensual experience that envelopes the viewer and apparently wants to draw them into the world of a mental patient. The focus for this is the Bethlem Royal Hospital, for many years London’s main mental asylum and more commonly referred to as ‘Bedlam’.

In practice this involves a lot of commissioned work artists in a variety of mediums. There are sculptures, audio-visual pieces, paintings and a number of interactive works. While the works differ widely in their forms and meanings they’re tied together by careful lighting and the omnipresent uneasy ambient music that fills the tunnels.

You enter the gallery in pitch darkness, feeling your way along a ramp into the art space. It’s a nice way of underlining the fact that you’re leaving one world behind and stepping into another. What you notice very quickly once you're inside is the sheer abundance of art here. These tunnels are a big space to fill but there’s room enough for larger pieces to breathe (in case literally), while also providing more claustrophobic spaces that encourage us to get right up to the art. It’s clear that a lot of time and thought has gone into where and how these artworks are going to be displayed. There are some pretty enormous works here that only work fully if you step back and let the entirety of them sink in, and also many which encourage close examination of the intricacy of design, or to read minutely scrawled messages written inside them.

There’s so much here that it feels impossible to comprehensively write about every piece, but regardless there are some that I particularly enjoyed.

One of the first pieces you see upon entering is Tina Tsang’s exploration through sculpture of religious idols. We see a number of statues of the Virgin Mary, each distorted and altered in some way. They haven’t been smashed apart or vandalised, all of them look like they’ve been organically transformed or dissected to reveal something present all along. For example, in one of them we see golden roots winding their way through her body, growing up through her and out of her robes. Moving to the rear we discover that the back of her head is that of an owl, and her back has been excavated to reveal tiny, complicated and intricate design work. The statues faces are of transparent perspex, and peering through reveals a video screen inside the head. All of Tsang's sculptures here follow similar lines, and I like how they reward the attention and curiosity of the viewer. It's also a neat subversion of the religious purpose of these icons. They're still objects of reverence, but now divorced from their Catholic origins, their meaning smeared to encompass a wider personal and religious scope.

Another thing I particularly liked was Tessa Farmer's mixed media piece. It seems to capture a frozen moment during an explosion in a taxidermists. Small preserved animals float, hung on invisible monofilaments from the ceiling. Objects seem to be have been picked to accompany them with the greatest of care; tiny pieces of rubble, concrete, broken glass float serenely in this strange cloud. There are things that seem to have melded together, skulls repurposed into strange boats, odd combinations of animal and material. I even saw a tiny preserved spider, tied ever so gently around the middle and hung from the ceiling. This was the only piece of artwork with a queue to get into the room to see it. For obvious reasons they can't let big crowds of people into a room with such a fragile and delicate arrangement in it. One thing in particular caught my eye, a stuffed rat with a plant seemingly grown right through the middle of it. The rat looked shocked and distressed at this foreign invasion upon its body, which for me seems a concise way of symbolising some forms of mental illness.

There were many pieces worthy of comment here, and in general the quality of the work was very high. But paradoxically, even with some great pieces, I thought that when taken as a whole there are big problems with this event. I know a decent amount about Bethlem Hospital, but if you were here to genuinely find out what the experiences of the patients, you're going to be out of luck here. I thought it was darkly funny that this show supports 'Mind', the mental health charity, as in many ways this was one of the more sensationalist looks into mental illness I've seen. The the press for this event claims that it will:

"leave you questioning your 'compos mentis', an experience that will showcase the line between genius and madness has never been so thin."

And so, madness here is defined as something alluring, attractive and ultimately kind of sexy. This is a show that goes out of its way to be dark and weird, but does it in a very familiar , and slightly cliched way. The Old Vic Tunnels are milked for every inch of their gothic charm, the lighting and spooky ambient soundtrack all add up to an experience that's strongly reminiscent of the London Dungeon. They go so full-bore in trying to set up this grand guignol atmosphere that you very quickly get the impression that they're trying just a bit too hard. You can almost feel the designers tugging your sleeve as you look at a bloody straightjacket, asking nervously if you're feeling shocked and disturbed yet. It frequently feels like you've stepped into a Marilyn Manson video from the mid 90s.

It's a bit strange to pin down what works and what doesn't, because some of the pieces look like they might work in a different context, but the sensationalist surroundings rob them of much of their power. In one room there's a gigantic floating eyeball looking around. In exclusion this would probably be a powerful image to look at, but here it just becomes yet another scary thing in a haunted house.

I think if you're going to tackle the hugely complicated subject of madness in an art exhibition you have to seriously think about reaction you want from your audience. There's a piece in one of the rooms where you lay back, and watch a slowly evolving fractal morphing on the ceiling. It looks cool, but looking cool just isn't enough, there has to be some meat on these conceptual bones! This reaction of "huh, that's pretty cool" is what you have to a lot of the work here, and it's perfectly accurate: a lot of it is cool. But if this is an examination of how people were treated in Bethlem Royal Hospital, it's important to remember that these were real people with real medical problems and it feels a bit uncomfortable to be entertained on the back of their horrible experiences.

There was another slightly bizarre aspect to the whole affair in that as the exhibition was sponsored by the phone company HTC, their phones and logo were present IN some of the art. I'm not going to sit here and decry corporate sponsorship in art, if they want to sponsor something creative then good for them, and I'd imagine it's largely down to HTC that tickets were free to book. But even so, at times this sponsorship did seem a bit heavy-handed, particularly when, for example, you have a sculpture constructed primarily of the latest HTC handset.

Throughout this exhibition, the audience seems encouraged to treat it more like a theme park than any serious examination of either history or the current notion of madness. There was a big twirling swing people were queuing up play on, or mock ECT chairs parents were strapping their grinning children into to take a picture for the family album. I can't criticise them for this, they were acting precisely as they should be acting in this sort of funhouse environment.

Perhaps this is the key to working out the worth of 'Bedlam'. It's got a neat, spooky atmosphere with a lot of eye-catching and flashy art in it that encourages you to interact with it. Ultimately it's an entertainment, something that has way more in common with Madame Tussauds and the London Dungeon et al than most art exhibitions around. That sounds damning, but hey, if it can turn people onto the idea that art is fun to look at then I suppose it can hardly be a failure. I just wish they didn't try to dress it up as a serious examination of the history of mental health care and an examination of mental illness.

All pictures © Ian Gavan

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