It’s always slightly odd to hear yourself on an audio
recording; your voice doesn’t sound quite as you expect. Watching yourself on
video is even worse. Last Wednesday, I had the even more distinctly odd
experience of watching a professional actor portray me on stage, voicing my own
words.
I was at a performance of “The Invisible Condition” by the Last
Word Theatre at the Bread and Roses theatre in Camden. It’s a documentary
theatre piece about the conditions in NHS mental health care and the obstacles
facing those of us with mental health problems and seeking help. The script –
by the director, Stephen Bailey – is derived verbatim from interviews with
service users, professionals, researchers and journalists. And in that
capacity, both I and Professor Sir Simon Wessely, President of the Royal
College of Psychiatrists were interviewed. And therefore appeared on stage.
It’s a very odd experience to hear yourself on radio or to
see yourself on TV. It’s weirder still to witness your words voiced on stage.
And, for me, very strange indeed to hear and see myself speaking and acting in the
person of a flame-haired female actor.
Lookalikes
(apologies to Private Eye)
Anna Demetriou; Actor Peter Kinderman; Professor
In my judgment, the play is excellent. Not, perhaps, easy
viewing, and certainly not a light-hearted evening’s comedy. The play features
relatively little of my tedious dialogue, as it relies primarily on the testimony
of people who have struggled to access mental health services and have struggled
to reconcile the services on offer with their needs. It also uses the experiences
of mental health nurses; caught in the middle of professionals with contrasting
views, people in dire need of help, inadequate services and increasing demands.
Stephen Bailey, the director, has woven together a number of
different voices, recorded separately, to give a narrative which – in my
opinion – tells a powerful story about confusion and political neglect. It
speaks to the dilemmas that many of us struggle with every day; the issues of
access to services, our reliance on diagnosis and on medication (and the
inadequacies of these approaches), the effects of seeing our struggles with our
mental health as merely the symptoms of illness and the consequent reliance on ‘treatment’,
and on the impact of the living out of these controversies on the day-to-day
work of mental health staff, principally nurses. I was impressed as to how the different
voices (mine, which I recognised, and Simon’s, which I could also clearly hear)
were re-structured to tell a convincing and, in my opinion, true story.
There’s an obligation on artists; script-writers and
directors, on journalists and film-makers. The un-edited streams of
consciousness of those millions of us involved in mental health care, from all
perspectives, cannot tell much except chaos without editing. And that process
of editing can tell falsehoods or truths. Even verbatim theatre (where the
material is the words of the contributors, as originally spoken) relies on
editing, as material is selected and organised in sequence to tell a story. We,
the audience, rely on the artists to tell an honest story through that process.
I would encourage colleagues and friends to go and catch “The
Invisible Condition”. It’s in matinee at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre (http://www.etceteratheatre.com/?id=2&wod=08/09/2017)
from 9th August.
In all truth, I was able to anticipate the ending. But I
still ended up in tears. And, given the context of my involvement in the show,
that was remarkable.
