Piece of Mind

I have about half a dozen articles unpublished in the blog store on the theme of theatre's failure to address mental illness in a meaningful manner. Mostly, they slip back into the draft file, either too angry to print or just another iteration of a theme better expressed elsewhere.

Quite a few of them praise the Scottish Mental Health Film and Art Festival. I might not be entirely happy with the name - the notion of celebrating Mental Health is strange, and I do have a habit of getting confused about what Mental Health might mean.

Luckily, Piece of Mind even addresses this problem. It is a clumsy interlude in a generally coherent and dynamic hour, but that one of the performers, perhaps voicing one of the many young bi-polar volunteers who helped to script this slice of intelligent physical theatre, actually mention the problematic nature of talking about Mental Health warmed my bitter heart.

Ever since theatre realised that it didn't have to be all about kings and their strange family relationships, the pressure has been on to make performance relevant and meaningful. Token gestures towards rewriting the classics into a contemporary context rarely cut it - it's tough to recreate Euripides' sympathy for Medea when she is reduced to a single mother hacking up her kids on a new build housing estate - but Piece of Mind has a modest goal: to represent the bi-polar experience in a non-sensational, sympathetic manner.

A mixture of devised and physical theatre, using conversations with young people diagnosed as bi-polar, Piece of Mind has a gentle flow, between more painful recollections and hopeful presents. Bi-polar is examined not simply as wild mood swings, nor as a heightened consciousness, but a recurring mental challenge that infects both good and bad times.

Although the non-judgemental approach is an old stereotype of "issue based" theatre, Coffey and Paine allow the stories of the various contributors to speak for themselves. Sensitively using choreography to illustrate some of the monologues and conversations, speaking together or alone, manipulating the set to  mark the beginning and ends of various scenes, they simply roll out the narratives and refuse to either draw conclusions or trivialise the often painful memories.