mental health
Markie Robson-Scott
“What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?” Angie (a flirty, engaging Elizabeth Moss) is about to give birth to psychiatrist RD Laing’s baby, and you have to agree that it’s not the wisest plan. She’s confiding in one of the disturbed residents of Kingsley Hall, Laing’s experimental psychiatric community in east London where therapists and patients lived communally, anti-psychotic drugs and ECT were outlawed and LSD (and going to the pub) was part of the cure.Angie, an American psychologist, is drawn irresistibly to Laing’s charisma, Paisley shirts and velvet suits. She moves in with him and the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health issues.Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life – a quote from Katherine Mansfield’s personal journal – is not actually a memoir even in the most broad-brush sense of the term. Rather it’s a collection of essays – meditations one might call them – on depression and life and what makes it worth living. Reading this book you wonder, so don’t Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy fans will be familiar with "New York neurotic" – performed mostly by Jewish writers and comics, with Woody Allen being the exemplar. Chris Gethard, however, is from New Jersey, was raised as a Catholic and is not neurotic at all. Rather, this guy has been suffering from actual, pain-in-the-head, clinically diagnosed and heavily medicated depression for most of his life, and has now written a show about it.Career Suicide (which Gethard has performed in New York and at the Edinburgh Fringe last year) is certainly a frank account. He takes us through the low points - the suicidal thoughts Read more ...
Vladimir Shcherban
On 10 October 2016, World Mental Health Day, the team of Belarus Free Theatre came back together to start the final stages of production for Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion, a new theatre show based on Arnhild Lauveng’s autobiographical book. Arnhild Lauveng is a Norwegian writer and practicing psychologist. In the book she tells the story of her own recovery from the incurable condition of schizophrenia.Every production created by Belarus Free Theatre is dedicated to those people who challenge themselves and the circumstances they are living in. The story of BFT itself is a story of overcoming Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been constantly revived ever since. Not only does it have a strong story, but the characters, and their interaction, are credible, engaging and dramatic, while the play fizzes with ideas as well as emotions. It is a contemporary classic.Like all the best well-made plays, it has a single set and a limited time span. Located in an NHS psychiatric unit, Blue/ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-the-community schizophrenic, went on to be filmed starring Daniel Craig. In 2000 he returned to the subject in Blue/Orange.The play was first performed at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre and introduced Chiwetel Ejiofor as Christopher, a young man from a White City estate who has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He's about to be discharged Read more ...
Marianka Swain
My skin is still tingling with the presence of imaginary critters. Never mind I’m A Celebrity… or Bear Grylls’s latest expedition – Tracy Letts has got them beat when it comes to nightmarish creepy-crawlies. But it’s not just a creature feature: this starry 20th anniversary revival at London’s newest pop-up theatre offers an eerie mirror to contemporary paranoia.Cocktail waitress Agnes (Kate Fleetwood) is holed up in a squalid Oklahoma City motel, tormented by calls from abusive ex Jerry (Alec Newman), recently released from prison. When RC (Daisy Lewis), who works with her at a local Read more ...
Saskia Baron
These are sensitive times when it comes to playing anyone on screen with a mental health condition, particularly when it’s a comedy with Kristen Wiig. But Welcome to Me pulls it off, skittering nimbly along a tightrope between offensiveness, surreal humour and mawkishness.Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a failed veterinary assistant first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her teens and now living on disability benefits, mandatory therapy and medication from her controlling therapist (Tim Robbins, pictured below right). He considers her to have borderline personality disorder (BPD) and certainly she’ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
RD (“Ronnie”) Laing was a typically eccentric 1960s guru. A Scottish psychiatrist who was one of the leading lights of the anti-psychiatry movement, his 1960 classic The Divided Self helped a whole generation to a deeper understanding of mental illness and especially the experience of psychosis. This new drama, by theatre writer and critic Patrick Marmion, is an exploration of an imaginary episode in his life, and is staged on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia Association, a therapeutic collective which Laing co-founded, and of his experimental asylum at Kingsley Hall Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by the past, cops with overbearing bosses descended from Jane Tennison – they’re all out there, all the time. Even the casting department is running on empty. It’s been precisely five days since Unforgotten unveiled a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker. Now here comes River, featuring a chirpy detective played by Nicola Walker.River is written Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not unduly dedicated to the dramatic verities they were supposed to be representing: castrati like Senesino and Farinelli, sopranos like Cuzzoni and Faustina (who once came to blows onstage, presumably trying to upstage one another). Nobody cared much about plot or character, but they loved the magical effects: Zoroastro whisking Orlando away in a flying Read more ...