Based very loosely on a short story by Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez called "i only came to use the phone" this play written and performed by Leann O'Kasi is part of the cultural and artistic contribution to the Scottish Mental Health Week 2010 Arts and Film Festival going on in many venues across the city.
The background details of this delicate and touching performance is given The List article by director Alison Peebles.
When we read about people who hear voices inside their heads, it is usually in grim news reports involving severe psychiatric illness. Like many medical complaints, however, ‘auditory hallucinations’ exist across a whole spectrum of intensity. This was a revelation to director Alison Peebles and writer/performer Leann O’Kasi when they came to prepare for Dirty Paradise, a play about a woman trying to escape her voices.
‘You’d think that people who hear voices are all schizophrenic, but they’re not,’ says Peebles. ‘Some people just hear these voices – they sound as if they’re in the room or in the street with you, speaking to you, shouting at you or arguing with each other. There can be a whole conversation going on. It’s just extraordinary to think that people have got that going on in their head.’
The quality and depth of the play could be seen in the faces of individual audience members as they would tense up when a feature of the troubling observations of the character would hit a personal aspect of their private internal struggles and then , like a psychological spotlight,suddenly ease with relief as the spotlight veered away to another person who would go through the same short;sharp; shock turmoil.The lesson to be learned is that Mental Well Being , if not Health is a spectrum , not a demarcation.
Unlike the trend in stories of stress and anguish of Mental Health issues this story finishes in a resolution and uplifting ending , to the relief of the character and a large part of the audience as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment