Mental Health Awareness in Performance

It’s mental health awareness week and theatre in Scotland is gearing up with some well-timed shows; dealing with caring for someone with mental health problems, or with caring for yourself through the pain of loss and heartbreak. 

In Normal/Madness, writer Fiona Geddes explores the “complex interplay of a parent-child relationship,” growing up with a relative suffering from schizophrenia. Talking to The Skinny over the phone, the morning after performing at Inverness’s Eden Court, she talks about how she was initially unsure about making the show, how her “duty was to protect my relative, who was scared of the stigma.” Growing up, Geddes says the condition was never something they explicitly talked about , “but the only way to get rid of that type of stigma was to make this kind of work,” and so Normal/Madness was born. 

The decision to protect her relative’s identity came from sitting down with mental health professionals and all discussing it together, but her relative is “very supportive” of the show and the work it is doing to combat the stigma against mental health conditions. “I finally feel like someone understands,” Geddes tells us her relative told her on first seeing the show. 

If the show is, as Geddes describes it, "a journey of understanding,” it is not just about the understanding she and her relative found through the experience of making the show. “An audience member got in touch after a show wanting to thank us for sharing our story. He had had a familiar experience growing up and said that he came to the show with reservations,” but he found understanding within Geddes’s story. “Reaching people like that is what making theatre is all about.” 

A little later this month, Francisca Morton's Torn is set to tour. The narrative evolved from a workshop with visual theatre practitioner Renee Barker, exploring different kinds of play. “We collected heaps and heaps of moments, and then we wrote them out onto report cards as stick men and we gave them each an emotion attached to whatever they were.” Combining this with the image of a stiff pair of jeans and  “playing with paper to see how much theatrical expression we could get from it, beginning with the material itself,” the narrative of the show was born.

It is a textless piece exploring the pain and loss experienced in the aftermath of a break up. Morton herself works as a psychotherapist in Edinburgh and finds her work influenced by this. “Any theatre piece that has a person in it or character, puppet or whoever, there’s immediately a whole world where they can feel or do anything in relation to someone else,” says Morton over soup as she takes a break from rehearsal. “There’s a theory called Attachment Theory, about attachment, loss, and different styles of attachment that we as humans – the way in which we bond in intimate adult relationships, similar to how we were taught to love when we were really little. Things like that I find really interesting to try and use in the work.” 

Although it is a textless piece, Torn uses a live foley artist. Musician Barney Strachan came up with the idea after they experimented with all the different sounds paper could make. It’s “all about this art of making sound at the right moment, and finding the right thing to make a certain noise which might not be the same thing. It came out of having a palette of sound effects.”

While both shows explore very different topics, through very different approaches, both focus closely on the human experience of something very personal and of making a connection with the audience. “There’s a certain mental anarchy to not being told what to think but being allowed to perceive and interpret your own point of view. Different audience members might take away something completely different and I quite like that,” says Morton. And Geddes ends on the motto of her company: “to inspire laughter, tears and new ideas.” It looks like both of these shows are set to do just that.

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