The worst thing about the Dublin Fringe Festival is that there are so many shows that you miss most the first time round. It s only when you read a review that says blistering performances...endearing, upsetting, funny...a magnificent achievement , that you realise you ve screwed up.
The best thing about the festival, however, is that the really successful plays invariably return. So if, like me, you missed the Purpleheart Theatre Company s production of Joe Penhall s Some Voices, it s now being staged at Dublin s Project Theatre, for a limited run.
Some Voices, on paper, looks like it might be a difficult night s theatre for many people. Its subject is Ray, a young Londoner who has schizophrenia, who sets himself the Herculean task of leaving hospital and trying to face life minus his medication. The play concerns itself with this quest.
That s why I say Some Voices is not actually a play about schizophrenia, says director John O Brien. It s not one of those well-intentioned Channel Four documentaries! On the contrary, what attracted me is simply that it s a brilliant tale about a guy who has a problem and his problem happens to be that he s schizophrenic. And has to take chlorpromazine, which he describes as lithium times ten . A serious downer. But his ambition is to live an ordinary life. That s all. And he believes he can control the problem if he has the right environment, the right people around him and enough willpower. That is a very courageous thing to do. And that is what the play is about. Ray trying to meet all the demands of this challenge.
Even so, the major thing working against Ray , admits John, is the illness itself . And it transpires, his family. As part of O Brien s research for the play, he studied schizophrenia and talked with schizophrenics.
There definitely are theories claiming that, given the right environment, schizophrenia can be contained, he claims, so Ray strives to create a stable, family life with his one surviving relative his brother. But it s important, in such a setting that the schizophrenic confront issues in the past, because the failure to do so can spark psychotic incidents. And so much of this play is about him trying to do simply that: have a conversation with his brother. But the brother won t have that conversation, just won t go down that road with him. Anyone who has a schizophrenic in the family will recognise the scenario.
Indeed, O Brien admits that although none of the cast or himself were ever diagnosed as schizophrenic, as far as I know all did, at various points during this production, ask themselves serious questions about the illness. This, too, clearly is part of the dialogue that is set up between the actors and the audience. Which explains why some, according to the director, are saddened some uplifted and nearly all affected or touched in some way by Some Voices.
It was a very bleak experience working on the play, John observes, but once we all confronted the emotions Some Voices calls forth, we realised we had to deal with it as honestly as we can, fashion it into a narrative that is interesting and entertaining.
But it definitely is true that the more discussion we had about the topic, every one of us began to doubt ourselves, and say things like I ve actually had those symptoms. Maybe we re all mildly schizophrenic.
Schizophrenia is so misunderstood. It s not, for example, a split personality. In fact the word schizophrenic doesn t describe a single thing. It s more a cluster of symptoms, many of which are shared with other illnesses. And when we looked at that cluster of symptoms we realised we all had them, at some time or another, in our lives. Maybe that, too, is why people seem to identify with this play.
Theatrical poetry created out of pain, one could say. Don t miss it.
Some Voices, written by Joe Penhall and directed by John O Brien, is currently running at the Project Theatre in Dublin.