The Mirror Stage
Space Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Project Arts Centre’s preshow announcement normally offers the regular mix of practical advice and plea: where to exit if there’s a fire; a request to turn off your phone. Lately, the venue’s disembodied voice has also been reassuring. “In the unfortunate event of an emergency,” it says, “remember you’ve been here before.”
People hear voices in theatre – an ingenious observation by Brokentalkers’ illuminating new work about psychosis, which they developed with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan’s play features a company of dancers workshopping with a group of invisible voices whose experiences of losing contact with reality are unflinchingly real – as one of them describes a frightening auditory hallucination, “Feel the command land in your body.”
Brokentalkers’ surreal theatre has veered towards the hallucinatory before. The former Irish Times critic Peter Crawley wrote that trying to describe The Circus Animals’ Desertion, their play about WB Yeats, was “like sending dispatches from an acid trip”.
Here, there is something touchingly reaffirming in Eddie Kay’s lucid choreography, which enacts simple instructions by real people (“I want to see the performers going up to the corner of the stage and back down”). In a play about illusions, stage directions may be separating hallucinations from reality.
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As we hear people’s histories of psychosis, a group consensus on a turning point within early childhood – the psychoanalytical theory of the play’s title – is represented via a warp of familiar fairy-tale imagery, a dancer in Little Red Riding Hood’s shawl seeing their movement mimicked by someone in a wolf mask.
One man’s story of fleeing in paranoia is told in a striking solo by Diarmuid Armstrong, by jolting movement performed against an artfully elliptical montage by the video designer José Miguel Jiménez that misrepresents the man’s speech.
We hear people’s experiences of feeling socially excluded. “You feel like an alien,” a young woman says – prompting a rapid, exhausting solo by Carolina Wilkinson danced to the squelchy techno of Valgeir Sigurdsson’s effective music.
The dance is also alive to the trauma of loved ones. In one aching duet by Bun Kobayashi and Kévin Coquelard, a concerned woman gesturing outward with crisp motions keeps missing connections with a man trapped in a kind of lethargy, his movement sluggish and depressed.
Sometimes Kay’s choreography is affecting when it’s literal rather than abstract. When Coquelard channels a man speaking matter-of-factly about the commonness of the illness, he remains rooted in the ground, sincerely lip-syncing every syllable of the man’s speech, his meticulous movement hitting home the man’s message.
An extended sequence given to a teenage musical-theatre performer – isolated and dismissed before sinking into a startling hallucination – eventually relents to an encouraging story of recovery. In hearing her notes for the play, and realising Brokentalkers have performed all of them, we’re reassured the past 80 minutes have been unquestionably real.
The Mirror Stage is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Wednesday, November 12th, and at the Everyman, Cork, on Tuesday, November 18th
