SMHAFF: Three Films at the GFT

At the risk of sounding like somebody who thinks about the consequences of what he says before he says them, I have always had a concern about the representation of mental health issues within art. My beloved theatre is a special offender: 'madness,' even in the hands of the most capable writers and directors, frequently becomes a generic craziness, more important for moving the plot forward than addressing the challenges of mental health disorders.

When Shakespeare uses it like this in King Lear, it's like theatre has permission to throw the lunatic on stage with no worries about how this representation influences the audience's perception of, say, bi-polar.

This means I like the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival (SMHAFF). I find their brochure impossible to navigate, and the mixture of professional performance and community workshops is bundled together. It's so big, so comprehensive, but somewhere there is some important theatre that does understand why theatre can't keep on caricaturing the 'crazy.'

I know that Barrowland Ballet are presenting Tiger as part of the festival, but it is probably better to redirect readers to the website. Until I get a better handle on the events, I'll just slap up a few selected highlights as I receive press releases.

The mighty GFT is hosting a few films: ' three cutting-edge documentaries on the theme of reality.' The subject matter took me by surprise: Alzheimer’s disease (First Cousin Once Removed),  and I Am Breathing which looks at 'the final few months of the life of Motor Neurone disease sufferer Neil Platt.'

The surprise is that I don't especially associate these illnesses with mental health. Yes, I am ignorant: I am glad the festival is making the obvious connection. It pulls away from the usual idea that mental health is all about that difficult illnesses that have psychiatric textbook symptoms (and hog the headlines whenever mental health is discussed).

This is why I like the SMHAFF - it challenges my lazy expectations. Plus there's a film about Mariel Hemmingway, and I have had a crush on her since I first saw Manhattan at the age of twelve.






Press Release Begins:

Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival:
Sunday 6 – Sunday 20 October
The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival returns to GFT for 2013 with three cutting-edge documentaries on the theme of reality.
Alan Berliner makes a deeply personal statement with his latest film First Cousin Once Removed (Sunday 6 October, 17.30), a portrait of his friend and mentor, the poet Edwin Honig who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Berliner, an experimental documentary filmmaker whose films have received awards at many major international film festivals, will host a master class at GMAC at 13.30 on Sunday 6 October and then take part in a Q&A after the screening at GFT.
The final few months of the life of Motor Neurone disease sufferer Neil Platt are recorded in powerful documentary I Am Breathing (Monday 14 October, 18.00), which will be followed by a discussion that asks: who cares for the carers?

Double Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple brings us Running from Crazy (Sunday 20 October, 19.45), an insightful documentary about Mariel Hemingway, the actress and grand-daughter of writer Ernest Hemingway, and her struggles to understand her family’s history with mental health issues. 

We hope to be joined by Barbara Kopple for a Q&A following the screening.

The Fantasist

The Fantasist centres around an individual struggle for control over mental illness: specifically looking at bi-polar in its more manic phase, it combines puppetry, physical theatre and humour to describe the interior state of a patient who embraces the thrill of abandonment. While Theatre Temoin acknowledge that this is their first use of puppets, they take full advantage of the inanimate characters to present a world unfamiliar, frightening and funny.

Mental states, especially bad mental health, are notoriously difficult to display in art. Fortunately, The Fantasist does not follow the typical show business "undefined mental illness" stereotype, and in a superb performance by Julia Yevnine, reveals the enthusiasm and intensity of a manic fugue. The looming appearance of a larger than life male puppet, who has echoes of Bluebeard, are threatening: if the comic interludes, including a song about the dangers and delights of being seduced, sometimes break the mood, they maintain the heightened awareness of the main character.

Director Ailin Conant and her devising team of Yevnine, Cat Gerrard and Julia Correa picture the heroine's broken sensitivity to time and communication: a friendship is damaged, a nurse dismissed through the same conversation happening simultaneously on-stage but apart in real time. The ambiguity of the ending, when the real and the fantastic are finally confused, emphasises how bi-polar is not easily cured. Its connection to creativity and inevitable destructiveness are identified succinctly: Yevnine's Louise is both artist and patient, and it is the tension between the two that forces her to question whether the real is better than the hallucination.

There are a few weak points in the production: Yevnine's performance is so powerful that it reduces the others to bit-part players, and the nurse's imprecations are unconvincing against the magic of the imagined world portrayed by the puppets; the manipulation of certain objects is relatively clumsy against the puppet work. Yet the aims of representing the bi-polar mind on stage, and following an individual story towards a conclusion are successful. This is one play that elucidates rather than mystifies the workings of the unbalanced mind.

Another apology

I don't read my own writing very often - not only is this pretty evident from the atrocious grammar, which a simple check would expose, but I find it as difficult as listening to my recorded voice. However, unless I have a look at this blog now and again, I doubt it will ever get any visits.

For various reasons, I am in a reflective mood - it might be the outbreak of post-herpetic neuralgia, or just the painful mistakes I made in another article last week. But I flicked over a few pieces, and picked up on two problems. If you haven't stopped reading yet, now might be a good time... unless you fancy joining my self-indulgent journey into critical doubt.

First stop: Love Hurts by Random Accomplice. About half of my review is concerned with the representation of mental illness. I castigate the author for giving a character an ill-defined mental illness (this is despite alluding to an ill-defined mental illness in my life. Well, critics are meant to be hypocrites. And the doctor hasn't told me what I have got, either).

It is a fairly consistent theme in my criticism: theatre often represents madness as a theatrical trope rather than a specific disorder. I hated The Wonderful World of Disassocia on the grounds that it didn't look like any breakdown I could recognise: Crazy Gary gets it for similar reasons.

Love Hurts is - as I do point out - a strong entry in Random Accomplice's compendium of effective theatre and a brave new direction for Johnny McKnight. If I had given it a star rating, it would have been a four. I am not sure that my review is undermined by my insistence that I need to know the clinical diagnosis of the protagonist. It mattered to me at the time.

But it is a quirk of my personality: I also get pissed off by lazy representations of religious belief, racial stereotyping, lazy humour, Coldplay albums, the lack of respect given to criticism. I know that I deliberately keep a blog so that I can indulge my obsessions without giving them the full weight of an "official review". Then I bang on about blogs being as valid as printed articles and say that criticism is about subjectivity.

Hopelessly confused, anyone?

Then I went into my assault on Terminus. Like with Disassocia, I was really out of the critical consensus with this. I was hating on a play that had been acclaimed across nations. And my first words?

It is everything I don't want theatre to be.

There's a bravery in taking such a bold stand, but it stands against one of my key definitions of what differentiates criticism from opinion. Instead of assessing a play on its own intentions, I was judging it against my desires. I'm not sure I can support myself on this one.

I tried the usual excuse: I was clearly revealing my bias. That works, as long as I don't expect the review to be taken seriously. And I know this isn't the first play that I have recognised as being outside of my interests. My usual tactic is to stay silent.

I want to find a justification for both of these reviews. Let me see...

My recent definition of a critic is a writer who assesses work against its own intention. I don't think either of my reviews were works of criticism, then. They were opinion.