LONDON CITY NIGHTS: mental health

Monday, November 30, 2020

Review: 'NoMad' at the Greenwich Theatre, 27th November 2020

Monday, November 30, 2020 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

NoMad reviewed by David James
Rating: 4 Stars

I've been a fan of Nell Hardy for some time. Way back in 2016 I saw her in the title role of Pandemonium Performance's promenade production of Alice in Wonderland in Abney Park Cemetary. She blew my socks off and since then I've tried to see her in as much as possible, as whatever 'it' is, she's got it.

So when I was invited to a stream of her one-woman monologue, NoMad there was no way I was passing it up. I'm not sure what I was expecting from Hardy, but a blistering and brutally honest monologue about her own experiences with homelessness, institutionalisation and mental health wasn't it.

Over the course of an hour and a bit, Hardy guides us through the nightmare of processed through a juddering and underfunded social care system intentionally designed to grind those caught in it to dust. NoMad focuses on mental health treatment, making it sound like a sadistic game of snakes and ladders, albeit one with loaded dice, too many snakes and maybe one creaky ladder. But hey, at least being an inpatient means you get food, heat and a bed...

The most vivid and well-realised moments come when Hardy is explaining the physical effects of homelessness. There's the misery of getting rained on: cold and wet clothes freezing you down to the bone and no prospect of getting properly dry anytime soon; the crinkle of an unwashed, overworn sock inside a shoe that hasn't been taken off in days and a vivid recounting of how it feels to have to piss and shit outdoors.

It's in that last one that Hardy achieves something of the sublime. Much of NoMad is about a sustained assault on her sense of self and the destruction of her ego. Here, in what passes for one of the more light-hearted sequences of the show, she compares herself to a dog - both of them having a piss out in the open. It feels entirely apt, a nice summation of how homelessness erodes away human specialness as divine creatures and reduces you to a deterministic biological machine.

I went into NoMad with respect for Hardy as an actor - and left with a mild sense of awe her writing skills. Prior to this, I'd assumed she was just 'yer typical talented drama school graduate making her way through London fringe theatre scene - but there's admirable sense of purpose and precision in this writing that you simply don't encounter that often.

Plus, while the text is light on explicitly referencing politics, it's difficult to read it as anything other than a condemnation of austerity. Though it might not be mentioned by name, the degradation of care systems, the suffering baked into benefits applications and the ease with which it's possible to fall through the cracks into homelessness are all symptoms of the economic snake oil that's killed hundreds of thousands and inflicted unnecessary pain on millions more.

I'm not saying loading every Conservative politician into some kind of gigantic rocket and firing it into the heart of the sun would have actually solved any of Hardy's problems, but it certainly couldn't hurt to try.

The only flaws of note here are technical. With COVID having effectively shut down fringe theatre I've resisted reviewing plays that have been streamed online. One of the reasons I enjoy theatre so much is the visceral sense of occupying the same space as the performer, which vanishes when you're experiencing a show on video.

While NoMad's minimalist staging and soundscape probably work quite well when you're physically present in the audience, it doesn't on video. And, putting my technical hat on for a moment, especially not on incredibly low bit-rate video that constantly stutters, judders and freezes, and where the sound breaks mid-way through (thank God for automated YouTube subtitling).

But it's a testament to the quality of the show that it hits as hard as it does even with one hand tied behind its back. Watching NoMad made me positively itch to get back into a theatre - here's hoping 2021 sees this get a proper run as it deserves as much attention as it can get.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

Review: 'Tiger Under the Skin' at the Gielgud Theatre, RADA, 26th June 2019

Thursday, June 27, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 3 Stars

Panic attacks suck. The common experience is an overwhelming feeling of doom and fear, that all but immobilises you. Sufferers think they're having a heart attack, or that they're being suffocated, or that they're about to vomit. Basically, it isn't fun. At all.

Tom Kelsey's Tiger Under the Skin tries to communicate what it's like living with anxiety and the fear of suffering panic attacks. Based on his personal experiences, we follow a fictionalised Tom as he struggles through an average day. We soon gather that he's in recovery after an unspecified spell at a mental health facility. He lives with his worried mother, rarely leaves the house and his closest companion is his dog, Digby.

We follow Tom as he walks Digby in the park, with even this wholesome and straightforward exercise fraught with tension. Then the day takes an unexpected twist when Tom is invited on a night out in town. Ordinarily, he'd make an excuse and cancel but today, for some reason, he accepts. His friends are as surprised as he is, but though going to a loud, busy nightclub is full of triggers for his attacks, he vows to make the trip. Maybe he's recovered enough to deal with this environment. Maybe not.

Tiger Under the Skin vividly communicates how anxiety manifests. There's a great moment early in the production where Tom's pessimism is characterised as a grumpy old Scotsman whinging away in the background: "it's pissing it down outside, you're staying in today", "you don't have friends any more", "you look terrible, and no-one is ever going to want you".

There's also a wonderful scene in which a simple tube ride becomes an odyssey of pain. Being enclosed in a cramped metal tube deep underground sets off Tom's paranoia, making him convinced a bomb is going to go off, or the tunnel will slowly flood, or that a fire will inexorably burn its way down the carriage. He feels a sudden terrifying certainty that he's going to die here. The fog of a panic attack begins to seep in at the corners, and the only thing that can stave it off is nervously drumming on the back of his hand and humming the Star Wars theme.

All this is imaginatively staged and performed, with much credit due to Kelsey and the backstage crew for synchronising the performance so well with many lighting changes and sound cues. It culminates in an ending where the Tiger Under the Skin becomes literal, in which Kelsey really gets to show off his physical performance skills.

But while the ending is visually striking, the descent into more abstract action overwhelms the small-scale personal story that's worked so well up to this point. The majority of the show feels small, personal and intricate detailed, so a finale that's full of broad strokes and dramatic twists didn't sit well. I get that there needs to be a sense of escalation, but the climactic scene felt a bit Hollywood (possibly because it ends by quoting David Fincher's Fight Club).

There was one other mild annoyance: every single word Tom utters (and sometimes each syllable) is accompanied by its own gesticulation. It makes things feel weirdly artificial: the character is supposed to be introverted and anxious, yet he slices the air with his palms like a CEO delivering a keynote speech. I get that against an empty stage in a one-man play a performer needs to ensure they're visually engaging, but I wish it this was toned down a bit.

Those criticisms don't stop Tiger Under the Skin achieving its goals. A lot of thought has gone into the best way to convey to the audience what anxiety and panic attacks are like, and by the time we're applauding it's done that a few times over.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Review: 'Section 2' at The Bunker, 19th June 2018

Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 4 Stars

You should hope you never have to grapple with mental health law and the rules and regulations governing treatment without consent. While it's never personally affected me, I frequently encounter it in my professional life and I've seen the emotional burden it places on families and individuals. All this made Paper Creature's Section 2 an equally moving and instructive theatrical experience.

Written by Peter Imms, and based on his own personal experiences of a friend being sectioned, Section 2 is a modest drama about a young man, Cam (Nathan Coenen) who, for no obvious reason, started behaving erratically. He is subsequently placed under a 'Section 2', which means you can be detained in a hospital for up to 28 days.

We open the play on the 28th day, on which it will be decided whether Cam can be released to his girlfriend Kay (Alexandra Da Silva). She has spent the last month slowly unravelling at the stress of visiting the clinic, observing Cam's behaviour and the uncertainty of the future. Evaluating whether he should be released is Cam's key worker Rachel (Esma Patey-Ford), balances sympathy with Cam and Kay against her medical impartiality.

Walking in the middle of this is Pete (Jon Tozzi). He's a school friend of Cam's who hasn't seen him in five years, yet recently received a call from him asking if he'd visit. He's essentially the audience viewpoint: a reason for the characters to explain the situation to the audience and react the way we're reacting.

Much of what makes Section 2 so effective is what it chooses not to do. This is a naturalistic, sensibly staged, linear human drama with a laser focus on its goals. I've seen theatre about mental health that seizes upon the idea of a disorganised mind and uses it as a springboard for a load of avant-garde wankery. Not here: Cam's condition isn't sensationalised at all, making it that much.

Imms wrote the play with input from the mental health charity Mind, who ensured that the technical and legal details of the story are accurate. This attention to detail is obvious in the final product, from Kay's slow-burning desperation at watching Cam appear to deteriorate the longer he's at the hospital, to the memory loss and slowness caused by his medication, down to the drab breezeblock walls punctuated by creased 'uplifting' posters.

In addition to a carefully written script and sensible staging, the performances are uniformly brill. Da Silva's Kay is believably frayed at the edges, trying and failing to suppress her frustrations and to do her best for her partner. A breakdown late in the show teeters on the edge of being too broad, but Da Silva has put in the performative legwork to make it come off. Meanwhile, Patey-Ford gives a masterclass in pragmatism, treating the situation with a tragic familiarity. You sense she has seen situations like this play out many times before and knows how long and painful the road ahead for Cam is going to be.

But it's Nathan Coenen's Cam at the centre of the play, and he delivers one of the most intensely realistic portrayals of a severe mental health condition I've seen in on stage in a very long time. In the most gut-wrenching moments, he plaintively explains that he knows something is wrong but has no idea what. This intense apologetic vulnerability is at odds with what we hear about his outgoing, rugby star past, making his confused diminishment and the brief moments the 'old' Cam surfaces into extremely powerful theatre.

This all adds up to an emotionally and intellectually satisfyingly three-dimensional drama that doesn't screw about. It's not the easiest play in the world to watch, but learning about this topic is important and I genuinely feel I've had a peek behind the curtain at the consequences of mental health law. Recommended.

Section 2 is at The Bunker until 7 July. Tickets here.

Friday, August 4, 2017

Edinburgh Fringe: 'Amy Conway's Super Awesome World' at Summerhall, 4th August 2017

Friday, August 4, 2017 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Amy Conway's Super Awesome World reviewed by David James

Rating: 4 Stars

For decades we've been told that playing video games will turn us into bloodthirsty, violent monsters with the attention span of a gnat. But what if video games were actually, genuinely, good for you. This is the core of Amy Conway's Super Awesome World, which makes a convincing case that those hours spent blowing away the forces of hell, descending into dark dungeons and repeatedly rescuing princesses might not have been wasted.

We begin with a potted history of Amy's history of gaming. In 1994 she was gifted a NES, on which she lost herself in the worlds of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda. The crude yet evocative 8-bit graphics were perfect imagination fuel: allowing her to transcend dowdy reality and spend time in a place where your actions matter: where you really can save the world.

The show uses the retro gaming aesthetic to tell the story of Amy's "quest for good mental health". She repeatedly goes back to her time spent volunteering for Samaritans, explaining that she sees each chat as equivalent to a game: you just have to say the right thing to advance to the next conversation 'level'. The audience also gets hands-on examples of the pleasure of play, participating in short, fun physical exercises in which we get to know the people around us.

It's often fascinating, especially when Amy lays out why she thinks gaming is good for mental health. The argument goes that games provide a structured environment with clear, achievable goals and a constant system of reward. This is contrasted with the chaotic and confusing real world, in which the rules are opaque and the goals always shifting. This made me reflect on the benefits games might have given me over the years. I thought of my time with notoriously difficult adventure game Dark Souls, in which death is frequent, quick and generally brutal. But while it's hard it's also scrupulously fair. If you pay attention, approach the game with patience and keep your cool, you can vanquish even the most ferocious monster.

This nicely ties into the games we play through the show, which emphasises teamwork, communication and mutual support. In one, I got a chance to taste a morsel of Amy's work with the Samaritans. She was blindfolded and had to cross the stage with my assistance. Here I was trying to deliver precise and useful advice to someone who couldn't see where they were going, who had placed their trust in a complete stranger and whose fate ultimately rested in my hands.

This is just one example of the care that's gone into making Super Awesome World coherent. The show goes to some pretty heartrending places, Amy eventually her soul and encouraging us to share our most vulnerable moments. This isn't a show about big performances - Amy sometimes seems quite shy on stage - but there's a palpable honesty that pays off gangbusters in these closing moments.

While the show is eager to sing the benefits of gaming, I couldn't help but think of the other side of the coin. I think that artificial sense of achievement video games provide is genuinely addictive - for example, the dopamine *whoosh* of levelling up in World of Warcraft has consigned countless teenagers to an isolated, pallid adolescence. Is there a danger that getting accustomed to a life spent in virtual worlds where you're always the legendary hero makes unfair 'IRL' that much more mentally unbearable? In a video game you can try and try until you inevitably triumph. Reality is rarely so accommodating.

But maybe that's a topic for another show. Amy Conway's perspective on gaming is original and accurate - not to mention that she avoids descending into obscure references. On top of that, obvious care has gone into capturing the 8-bit aesthetic in the on stage graphics and sound (I was particularly pleased to hear the soothing bleeps of DuckTales' The Moon as I took my seat). Super Awesome World isn't always an easy watch, but it's smart and satisfying stuff. Recommended.

Amy Conway's Super Awesome World' is at Summerhall until the 27th of August. Details here.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS