Ridiculusmus on MDMA, PTSD & Give Me Your Love
A new work by adventurous theatre group Ridiculusmus explores the healing potential in altered states of consciousness. We speak to directors David Woods and Jon Haynes about their research into the use of MDMA in treatment of PTSD
In November, amid a political landscape that appears to be otherwise devolving, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light on the third and final phase of trials which could alter the sole role of the drug MDMA from a recreational, illegal party and nightlife favourite, to a legal medicine designed to alleviate the effects of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among military veterans.
It’s a decision that could potentially change lives and industries, with the notoriously industrious, often cripplingly competitive US drugs market finally getting a share of what’s so far been a patent-free experiment in human ecstasy. Perhaps more positively, thousands of clinicians and therapists would be granted the opportunity to provide relief for thousands of psychologically affected veterans.
Of course, much of this therapy, both in the US and the UK, has already been happening under the radar. MDMA (in its adulterated form) is much more freely available in Europe, but those involved in the clinical trials are subject to a distilled, near enough pure version of the drug costing a cool $400,000 a kilo. Slightly less competitive than the price texted to you every Friday from that unsaved number in your phone.
Jon Haynes and David Woods are neither psychedelic experimentalists nor military personnel, but the founders of celebrated experimental theatre collective, Ridiculusmus. Outright establishment frustration seems to have provided strong fodder for their most recent touring play, Give Me Your Love, the middle instalment of a trilogy of shows on the topic of mental health, each loosely connected but standing individually.
Give Me Your Love
Give Me Your Love is a jet black comedy about the anxiety of everyday domestic life after wartime. The script and initially bizarre staging are true to the company’s abiding approach of handling intriguing, sensitive material in a way that’s “seriously funny”, and concerns Zach and Euan, two Welsh squaddies dealing with the aftermath of unseen horrors while serving in Afghanistan. Since his return, family man Zach has boxed himself in. It’s a metaphor taken quite literally in the staging, which sees one of the pair encased in cardboard, stumbling around a dilapidated Port Talbot council house, while another is firmly behind a locked door. It is something akin to Abbott and Costello meets Trainspotting.
“The trigger for the staging concept is we both went to the Imperial War Museum on two separate trips, and we were both struck by a One Man Nuclear Test Capsule, which they affix to warships,” explains Haynes, who, with his partner, fleshed out the play over 12 months of intensive workshops in Cardiff, working out their rough concepts with a room full of enthusiastic participants. Haynes recalls interviewing a Gulf War veteran who described her uneasy life at sea, as nothing more than “Spam in a can.”
Unsurprisingly, the military has an even more strained relationship with drug use than most institutions. Give Me Your Love received rapturous praise upon its debut in cosmopolitan centres such as Sydney and London, but its upcoming 2017 tour takes it to locales such as Exeter and Aldershot, towns and cities known for their proliferation of servicemen and women.
“The reaction was quite shocked, I think,” recalls Haynes of recent performances in Bridport, Dorset. “We had an interesting, intimate post-show discussion in the bar after one of these things, but the audience were actually quite conservative there. There were a couple of women who wanted to talk about their own experiences with PTSD after violent relationships they had been in. There was one woman who argued with me about the effects of MDMA.
"She said she used to take it and get very depressed, and was worried that people in therapy would have what they call the comedown.” Haynes adds that Dr. Ben Sessa, a collaborator of the pair and a leading figure in drug research in the UK, suspects ecstasy’s supposedly brutal comedown is a myth, the result of too much drinking, dancing and little sleep.
“They've experimented with all this sort of stuff in the battlefield to enhance the performance of their soldiers or confuse the enemy in other ways, in order to get an advantage in a military setting,” explains Woods. “So then not to use it in [the] rehabilitation phase is just sort of hypocritical. But the military is caught up in so much hypocrisy, it’s that sort of territory where they can’t relax or experiment or be seen to be, and make dreadful errors on that basis. Everything from strategy through to duty of care has been spectacularly fucked up by generations of army personnel, leaders more so. Somebody who can get in there and lead and strategise, like, say, Napoleon, I’m sure he would be very keen to use MDMA to help his post-battle fatigue.”
"We have to offer a realm that only theatre is capable of..."
While we can only speculate as to whether Napoleon would have indulged himself with MDMA (and we’re not likely to find out anytime soon), Woods’ concerns and frustration may be borne out of drama, but are reflected in depressing, real world statistics.
“Soldiers dying by their own hand post-war is higher than any number of deaths in the field of war,” he adds. “People need to wake up and embrace anything they can to stop that trend.”
Nonetheless, despite its unusual setup (and a brief section influenced by the unlikely combination of World War I shell shock victims with hardcore Rotterdam rave music), Give Me Your Love veers anyway from anything highfalutin, staying true to the company’s initial vision of theatre that is ‘seriously funny’.
“We have to be imaginative, to offer a sort of realm that only theatre is capable of,” acknowledges Woods. “So doing that from a dreary, blank, gutted house is much more fruitful than us trying to create that from a battleground or multiple characters. So there are lots of choices, and many of them are the economic reality of doing small-scale touring theatre. But they still require a bold investment in the belief that the imaginative realms are powerful ways of portraying experiences.”
Producing a disarmingly sensible show out of an openly absurdist situation, Ridiculusmus continue to search for the right way forward through the most unlikely of solutions. Here’s hoping this current dose has the desired effect.
Ridiculusmus: Give Me Your Love is at the Lowry, Salford, 10 & 11 Mar, part of SICK! Festival 2017