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I have about half a dozen articles unpublished in the blog store on the theme of theatre's failure to address mental illness in a meaningful manner.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.

Mental Health in Theatre

Until I get a better idea, I still believe that the importance of theatre is in its potential for providing a public discussions about serious issues -  I end up writing four reviews of Wonderland because, regardless of the end product, it took on a Big Issue and tried to present different approaches to it. There is something about the nature of performance as a communal experience, too. But that is even more ill-defined.

One area that theatre has consistently flubbed, however, is mental illness. Plays do exist that are sympathetic, or accurate, in their treatment of mental illness - especially in the last few years, there has been an effort to reach out to sufferers to allow  their experience to be reflected. Unfortunately, a fairly rich tradition exists - thanks Shakespeare for the "mad people" in King Lear - that is either viciously unkind or plays it for laughs. Even now, it's more common to find that mental illness is the motivation for a character's bad actions than it simply being a fact of their life. 

This is probably a reflection of  a social attitude seen in the law, where mental illness can be a defence akin to diminished responsibility. And so, I am enthusiastic about  the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, now occupying much of Scotland (October 1 -24).

Much of the festival features community orientated shows - which fall outside of my critical remit, until I develop a satisfactory way to  discuss them. It does have plenty of professional theatre and film: Vanessa Coffey's Piece of Mind uses dance to interpret the voices of bipolar, the Johnny Cash biopic gets a screening, alongside Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. In the Old Hairdressers, My Sister by Scandal Theatre gets physical and Liz Lochhead is joining a plethora of speakers  for a day of workshops, readings and exhibitions.

Frankly, the whole festival is too big for me to preview: it's tough to pick highlights. But every year, it presents a forum for the discussion of one thing that society has rarely understood. The recent death of Szasz, which led to obituaries that recalled his pioneering attempt to get a philosophical handle on mental health - and the controversy he caused -  reminded me that society hasn't even got a reasonable definition of it.