Four dancers move across the stage in a broken waltz, each holding a large white rag doll. For a moment the figures and their doubles seem to move as one, a trick of the eye that makes it hard to tell who is leading. The dolls’ movements are uncannily expressive, almost alive. In the next sequence the dancers take turns going limp while the others lift and guide their bodies like marionettes.
Over a layered, dreamlike soundscape, a man’s recorded voice plays: “The key to my recovery was realising that I have a knowledge that other people do not have, because I’ve experienced the voices, the shadows, the visions, whatnot, and I can use that, and that can be used to really make a difference in not just research but in people’s lives.”
This is a rehearsal for The Mirror Stage, a new work by Brokentalkers, the Dublin-based theatre company founded by Gary Keegan and Feidlim Cannon. The piece has been created in collaboration with people who have experienced psychosis. Through dance, sound and striking stage imagery, it seeks to illuminate an experience too often shrouded in misunderstanding and fear, to represent what it feels like when the reality you inhabit no longer matches the one everyone else perceives.
The project began in 2022, when Brokentalkers were touring The Examination, a work about health and human rights in the prison system. Among the audience was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, who was deeply moved by the company’s approach to blending testimony, research and performance. Soon afterwards the RCSI invited Brokentalkers to collaborate on a new project exploring psychosis, rooted in the lived experiences of those who have navigated it.
RM Block
Keegan and Cannon admit that, at the outset, they knew little about the subject. “We started meeting people and doing our own research and trying to educate ourselves,” Keegan says. “I suppose, what it means clinically, but also socially and personally, for people, for us as well; where do we intersect with this question around psychosis?”
Because they were working with intensely personal and sometimes painful material, they wanted to approach it with care. “We began with a simple question,” Cannon says. “When you imagine a theatre show about psychosis, what do you see on stage?”
What followed was a three-year process of interviews, workshops and rehearsals. The company maintained an ongoing dialogue with at least 15 people in recovery, alongside clinicians, researchers and creative collaborators. “That’s ultimately the question we’ve asked the people we’ve been working with, and it’s how the show itself is built,” Cannon explains.
Using those conversations, they developed a tentative script, which they repeatedly played back to participants for feedback. “It’s a lot of trial and error,” he adds, “a lot of experimentation.”
A key insight emerged early in the process. “We found very clearly that putting actors out there mightn’t be the best idea,” Cannon says. “People said they wouldn’t feel comfortable if someone was pretending they had experienced what they had.” Instead they looked for a more metaphorical approach.
A breakthrough came through one participant, Nicola, who suggested using dancers. Once an actor and dancer herself, she had stopped performing after experiencing psychosis, but she spoke passionately about dance as the right medium to express something so internal. The idea resonated with others.
“So much of psychosis is embodied,” Cannon says. “So much of it is internal. Across the board, people felt that was interesting and comfortable for them. Working with physical performers made sense. They chose that for us, and we listened.”
In the workshops that followed, participants worked with Eddie Kay, the production’s movement director, and its dancers. They didn’t recount events so much as describe sensations, what it felt like in their bodies, emotionally, physically or even through fleeting words and images. The performers – Diarmuid Armstrong, Kévin Coquelard, Bun Kobayashi and Carolina Wilkinson – then translated these impressions into movement.
“What I have, watching it, is a genuine feeling that they were listened to in that room,” Keegan says. “Through their bodies, the performers are saying, ‘I heard you, and this is what I think you mean.’ Maybe it is exactly that, maybe it isn’t, but that exchange is fascinating. Even though it’s not a literal re-enactment of a psychotic episode, with all the cliches that might imply, it’s a deeper, abstracted interpretation. I think the audience will feel that it’s coming from a real place.”
Creating The Mirror Stage required balancing artistic coherence with the responsibility of representation. Many contradictory experiences and beliefs emerged among the participants. “Particularly around attitudes towards psychiatry, medication, psychosis as pathology versus psychosis as a sort of spiritual experience,” Keegan says. “By layering people’s testimonies over the dance, we could capture those contradictions without trying to flatten them.”
That diversity of experience became one of the work’s central insights. “What are they believing? What is the voice saying to them?” Keegan asks. “Is it a voice that’s abusive or directing them or narrating? Can the voice sometimes be kind? One of the participants talked about a voice that kisses them on the head: it’s the voice of God, and God is hilarious. My feeling is that it’s very connected to who they are. It’s personal, the way our dreams are personal. You can’t control them, and they reveal something deep about us.”
And yet, for all those differences, certain motifs seemed to recur. “A really interesting thing that came up in the interviews,” Keegan says, “was around archetypes and the Jungian idea of the collective subconscious.”
Across many accounts, there were echoes of similar figures and themes. Because the participants were reflecting from a place of recovery, they could look back on these images almost as dreamwork, searching for meaning in what their minds had conjured.
“A lot of the therapy they do,” Keegan says, “is about asking what the symptom is telling me, what its usefulness is.” The creative process mirrored that therapeutic one: trying not to dismiss these images entirely but to understand the hidden needs or emotions they might reveal.
Keegan notes that stigma remains a powerful barrier to understanding. “If you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and experience psychotic symptoms, people often assume you’re automatically a danger to others,” he says.
“There’s still a real misunderstanding between the words ‘psychotic’ and ‘psychopathic’, which kind of surprised us. Even people working within mental-health services spoke about how, maybe on a subconscious level, those words get conflated. That confusion feeds fear, and fear feeds stigma. Part of what we’re trying to do is undo that.”
“Our goal is to make the best art we possibly can,” Cannon says. “It’s a marriage of real stories and art. It’s never a compromise.” Keegan agrees. “We’re exploring where theatre intersects with questions of psychosis, what is real, what is fake, and using the stage to investigate those ideas.”
He notes that one sequence, a fairytale-like dream scene, was informed by the late American avant-garde director Robert Wilson, whose meticulous, hypnotic visual language has long influenced Brokentalkers.
“Wilson was always a big influence on Feidlim and me, the way he layered images, staged contrasts, played with what to place on top of what,” Keegan says. “We’ve always tried to capture that same sense of liveness in theatre, the idea that it’s real, as real as it gets.”
That commitment to the real runs deep in Brokentalkers’ work. “It’d be very easy for Gary and me to go off and write a fiction,” Cannon says. “It’d be easy to read a research paper and base something on that. But what the audience may not realise is that when they sit there and watch the dancers move, it’s the result of deep collaboration. You’re seeing something that is real. You don’t get that a lot in theatre, not to that extent.”
Brokentalkers have been committed to this kind of collaborative, socially rooted practice since their founding, in 2001. Keegan and Cannon met as students on a post-Leaving Cert theatre course in 1996. “We gravitated toward each other because of our mutual disdain for theatre,” Cannon says, laughing.
His first real encounter with the stage came at 17, when he saw Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Abbey Theatre. “It struck a deep chord, but when I went back, hoping to recreate that feeling, the plays that followed didn’t connect. Maybe it’s because we’re from a working-class background, but a lot of the theatre just didn’t speak to us. We didn’t see ourselves in it.”
They founded Brokentalkers to change that, to make work that felt connected to real life, alive to the urgencies of the world around them. Over the past two decades they’ve built a reputation for blending documentary material with striking visual storytelling. Productions such as The Blue Boy, Have I No Mouth and The Examination have tackled subjects such as institutional abuse, personal grief and incarceration, always centring lived experience and moral complexity.
This year that cross-disciplinary spirit is being formally recognised: the Psychological Society of Ireland has timed its annual conference to coincide with The Mirror Stage, positioning the production as a meeting point between art, psychiatry and lived experience. The collaboration has drawn interest not only from artists but also from policymakers and researchers.
“What connects all our work,” Keegan says, “is a belief that theatre can still make a space for real stories, for people who aren’t usually represented, and for contradictions that don’t need to be resolved.”
With The Mirror Stage that commitment takes on new resonance. The piece aims not to explain psychosis but to make audiences feel something of its texture, to offer an imaginative encounter that replaces fear with understanding.
“We want to present something to an audience who may walk in not really knowing that much about psychosis,” Keegan says. “And hopefully they’ll walk out with slightly more open minds and open hearts towards people in our community who experience this.
“Because it could happen to any of us. There’s no hard-and-fast rule about who will experience disordered thinking or hallucinations. It could affect any one of us.”
Cannon shares the same hope. “For an audience to come and see a piece of work and leave with a little bit more understanding of what it is, that might sound like a small ambition,” he says. “But, actually, it’s a huge one.”
The Mirror Stage is at Project Arts Centre, in Dublin, from Wednesday, November 5th, until Wednesday, November 12th; and at the Everyman, Cork, on Tuesday, November 18th
