mental health
ChristineSaturday, 28 January 2017
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that... Read more... |
Chris Gethard, Soho TheatreFriday, 27 January 2017
Comedy fans will be familiar with "New York neurotic" – performed mostly by Jewish writers and comics, with Woody Allen being the exemplar. Chris Gethard, however, is from New Jersey, was raised as a Catholic and is not neurotic at all. Rather, this... Read more... |
First Person: 'Schizophrenia is still a taboo subject'Sunday, 16 October 2016
On 10 October 2016, World Mental Health Day, the team of Belarus Free Theatre came back together to start the final stages of production for Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion, a new theatre show based on Arnhild Lauveng’s autobiographical book. Arnhild... Read more... |
Blue/Orange, Young VicFriday, 20 May 2016
Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy, it won an Olivier Award for Best Play and has been... Read more... |
10 Questions for Playwright Joe PenhallTuesday, 10 May 2016
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of lithium, his early hit Some Voices (1994), about a care-in-... Read more... |
Bug, Found111Wednesday, 30 March 2016
My skin is still tingling with the presence of imaginary critters. Never mind I’m A Celebrity… or Bear Grylls’s latest expedition – Tracy Letts has got them beat when it comes to nightmarish creepy-crawlies. But it’s not just a creature feature... Read more... |
Welcome to MeFriday, 25 March 2016
These are sensitive times when it comes to playing anyone on screen with a mental health condition, particularly when it’s a comedy with Kristen Wiig. But Welcome to Me pulls it off, skittering nimbly along a tightrope between offensiveness, surreal... Read more... |
The Divided Laing, Arcola TheatreTuesday, 24 November 2015
RD (“Ronnie”) Laing was a typically eccentric 1960s guru. A Scottish psychiatrist who was one of the leading lights of the anti-psychiatry movement, his 1960 classic The Divided Self helped a whole generation to a deeper understanding of mental... Read more... |
River, BBC OneWednesday, 14 October 2015
Crime drama is a bit like the wheel. There’s only so much scope for reinvention. People try to come up with novelties all the time, then you turn on the telly and realise everyone else has had the same idea. Rumpled cops in macs, ex-cops haunted by... Read more... |
Orlando, Welsh National OperaMonday, 28 September 2015
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not... Read more... |
The Mentalists, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 14 July 2015
A Richard Bean play is always to be welcomed – he wrote England People Very Nice and One Man, Two Guvnors, two of the most enjoyably rambunctious comedies of recent years – but also with a note of caution. Sometimes, as with The Big Fellah... Read more... |
Richard Dadd: The Art of Bedlam, Watts GalleryFriday, 26 June 2015
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was... Read more... |
