A stage split into two. A mind split into pieces. Comprehension split into tatters. The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland is a fabulously-titled, utterly bewildering play. One half of the audience watch one half of the play, whilst the other half of the audience watch the other half, on the opposite side of the stage. After the interval, we swap sides. It’s interesting that the audience are required to move, rather than the actors, and I think this mixing up and unsettling of the audience must be a physical manifestation of what they play is about, and how theatre company, Ridiculusmus, want us to feel.

Unsettling both physically and mentally, the play is a disorienting study of psychosis. On one side of the dividing wall we have a doctor talking to his patient, who believes that he is the writer behind Nabokov’s work and was fathered by the frozen sperm of Hitler (which is why his hair parts on the left hand side – there are comic moments, despite the serious content). On the other side we have a domestic drama, with a mother increasingly showing signs of psychosis to her fairly indifferent sons. One side bleeds into the other through the opaque screen, sometimes resulting in an overwhelming babble of voices. Is one side a hallucination and the other the ‘truth’? Is one side a memory? Is the doctor actually a doctor? Is he schizophrenic too? Is he a figment of one of the other characters’ imaginations? I have no idea if I was supposed to come out of the play knowing the answers to these questions, but I certainly didn’t.

Massive amounts of research have gone into the production of this play, inspired by a treatment method for psychosis. Indeed, the title isn’t just a stroke of theatrical playfulness; in real life Western Lapland they do actually use a technique that is represented in the play to deal with schizophrenia, with success, placing importance on listening to all of the voices in a person’s life. It’s an ambitious, and laudable, undertaking. Perhaps the fragmentation, the chaos, the sheer incomprehensibility of the thing was on purpose, acting as a challenge, to provoke the audience into thinking about mental health. Perhaps. But this particular audience member was mainly provoked into thinking: what on earth is going on?   ★★☆☆☆     Deborah Sims   14/03/15