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Viva Voce is an intimate, meta-theatrical interrogation of the modern concept of mental illness which offers its accessible reevaluation. By using a space and medium the audience is guaranteed to know and love – the very space around them, the theatre – this 60-minute piece genuinely captivated and surprised me. Director Luke Casserly inverts theatrical conventions which becomes a metaphor imploring the audience to do similarly with their preconceptions about mental health.

The use of meta-theatre is clever if not subtle. Writer Lauren-Shannon Jones’ interactive presentation with the audience that opens the play had me genuinely wondering whether I was indeed at a play or wrongly at a lecture, but it also fosters an initially casual relationship between observer and observed which gradually becomes far more intimate. Her explanation of the presentation technique that connects memory with space is well-crafted and exposes the audience’s misconceptions of dramatic technique by giving insight into its actual mechanics. It too links the physical space with the mind and thus subversively instigates the parallel: the audience is challenged by the mechanics within a space they thought they knew,  and thus so are their preconceptions about the mental health it represents. The play becomes an interrogation of space, turning the theatre into the human mind. The audience remains a complicit hallucination within it, with Matt (McGowan) becoming the Paul Bettany role of the prodigal assistant (if you will), the pivotal figure who both physically and meta-fictionally dismantles the play. The turn is at first subtle, with the gradual fade of lights over the audience almost imperceptible, until the curt interjection of the fragmented hum and drum that will uncomfortably characterise the remainder of the play.

The set, initially basic, becomes elegant and intricate and arguably is the play’s protagonist, eliciting its own round of applause. The early literary and academic references make obvious the intellectual research that went into the writing but failed to be extended further than a tenuous allusion to Freud’s dream analysis.

The audience is notably never comfortable. The sinister quiet of the protagonist never fully immerses the audience into the play’s initial pretence. The climax turn is less surprising than one might hope, but this does leave room for an escalation of intrigue. The continuity of character between first and second halves, however, is unconvincing. Whether the latter protagonist’s stage absence is supposed to present her as more allegorical than her far more characteristically quiet counterpart in the earlier segment is simply not clear enough to excuse the fairly dramatic change in vocal confidence and social interaction.

This said, the play was captivating and effective. It’s ending was prolonged and slightly self-indulgent, not adding enough beyond the final lines to merit its extension. However, as a whole the piece offered a very refreshing, eye-opening and, crucially, realistic presentation of mental illness, without the screaming and shouting that so often characterises modern productions that revolve around hallucination and mental illness. It is a play that will continue to keep me thinking – a feat few performances achieve so effectively.

 

Viva Voce was playing at the New Theatre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival until 22nd September.