The Idiot Colony

Through the halls and wards of mental institutions shuffle those for whom the outside world exists only in memories – in snippets of film or music, and in the stories they tell of their lives, before those lives became defined by institutional routine. So the big band tunes of Glenn Miller recall the destruction and sexual license of the 1940s, a faux permissiveness which the three patients either entered into, or were violently forced into, and for which their sentences in the Idiot Colony were commuted. Now, the garish pop tunes of Rick Astley indicate the passage of wasted time. As the play culminates with the brutal “cure” (a lobotomy, one suspects) of one of the patients, these musical markers overlap and collapse into each other in an increasingly discordant cacophony. Sentences in The Idiot Colony cannot be measured in time, but in lives.

To say these patients shuffle, however, is a little misleading since where this production excels is in its refusal to treat these internees as little more than wasted case studies. These three patients, Jo, Mary & Victoria, dance and skip their way through several well-choreographed set pieces. Taking place in their one refuge from the oppressive routine, the hair salon, the actors are able to demonstrate clearly that these three do indeed have unique personalities which the institution may conceal, but may not remove – unless it does so on the operating table. The feisty enactment of a cinema sex scene is both extremely funny and, in recollection, utterly tragic.

Inventively staged by these three actresses, their use of props hidden in pockets, hair and, in one instance, a mouth, lends a beautifully dreamlike quality to the production. On occasion this strays into territory which feels overly surreal, but perhaps that is the point. Here is an unreal world simmering with a violence which, for thousands of Colony residents, proved brutally real.