SMHAFF present Mental and Mirror Mirror

My enthusiasm for SMHAFF comes not just from the diversity of arts that are part of the festival (they usually have a nice slot for physical theatre, which gives me my not-quite-dance shot for October). I have been generally impressed by the theatre pieces' attitude to mental health. Following on from nearly two thousand years of negative approaches from tragedy to comedy, SMHAFF's companies tend to be sympathetic and realistic.

The problem is usually a lazy attitude towards 'madness': it is a generic state, a bit like being sad or happy, and more likely to be a plot point than a character trait. Chekov said that if you see a gun on stage, it had better be shooting someone by the last act. Hollywood movies foreshadow a character's death from some illness by having them cough, once, in the first five minutes. Most theatre might as well have a rule that if a character has a prescription for anti-depressives, they are going to be howling by the interval, and probably killing people by the finale.

Anyway, SMHAFF avoids all of that, I am proud to present their double bill at Tramway...

Mental

The Metropolitan Police call him a Domestic Extremist. The NHS have described him as 'highly disturbed' and labelled him as Borderline Personality Disorder. 'A real and present threat to the safe running of our lawful business' is how E.ON described him at the Royal Courts of Justice. He prefers the term Mental.

Mental is an autobiographical one-man performance staged in a bedroom for an intimate audience. Spanning 13 years of the artist’s adult life, the story follows the turbulent experience of mental illness, suicide, social isolation, stigma, police and corporate surveillance and the dynamics of power present in such contexts.

Using the Data Protection Act, the vacuum cleaner has reclaimed all of the information that the State holds on him. Psychiatric records, police intelligence files and social services reports are woven together with personal stories and photographs that counter the ‘official’ version of events, creating a performance that is challenging and highly informative, at times tragically sad and at others profoundly
funny.

Mental has been acclaimed by audiences as a unique story and form, bringing together timely themes of undercover police and acute mental distress, told from a person that has lived through and survived such difficult challenges.

 

Mental was made with support from Arts Council England, Artsadmin and In Between Time.

 

Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror is a new documentary dance theatre piece on the subject of eating disorders for the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival 2013 (Festival). The audience is led in to a space in which carnival mirrors hang and the stage is marked out by fashion magazines…

 

Down the Rabbit Hole is a dynamic, Scottish-based theatre company that is carving a distinct path within the documentary dance theatre genre. It aims to raise awareness of mental ill health through entertainment has had sell-out shows in Glasgow for the last two years.