The Wonderful World of Dissocia

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Reviews

4 stars Sam Marlowe, The Times, 31 March

When it premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2004, Anthony Neilson’s evocation of dissociative identity disorder won accolades. Now, thanks to this National Theatre of Scotland touring revival, the rest of the country finally gets to experience the play, which also marks the Courts first mainstage opening under its new artistic director, Dominic Cooke. It proves to have been well worth the wait. Audacious, inventive, funny and frightening, Neilson’s production makes swaggering, cruelly witty yet compassionate theatre.

Neilson has spoken of a new wave of absurdism in British drama; if he’s right, he will surely be at the movement’s forefront. Dissocia _examines mental illness from the inside out, taking its audience into the inner life of its main character, Lisa (a terrific Christine Entwisle). The first act, when she has, we later learn, stopped taking her medication, is a surreal blend of David Lynch, _Alice in Wonderland and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The second, set in a psychiatric hospital, focuses on her return, probably temporarily, to normality.

Prompted by a dapper, faintly Freud-like Swiss watchmaker to set out on a quest to recover a lost hour of her life, Lisa travels to the kingdom of Dissocia. She is greeted by two desperately insecure security guards, manic as a pair of white rabbits, and goes on to meet all manner of curious characters.

There is a singing polar bear, a jolly-hockey-sticks female flying ace and a Pan-like scapegoat whose initial amiability evaporates when it transpires that his intention is to rape her. The kingdom is stalked by that emblem of depression, the evil Black Dog.

Moments of cockeyed, romantic loveliness, as when Lisa sings a hymn to her new land in a shower of scarlet petals, collide with scenes of sinister violence. Some of these are all the more disturbing for feeling less like wild improbabilities than heightened reality in particular, the sequence in which a bruised and battered council official perkily explains how, under a new government directive to lower street-crime statistics, she is required to stand in for the victim in everything from sexual assaults to car-jackings. Threats of war and terrorism lurk amid the eccentric dialogue.

The play’s second half, played, in Miriam Buethers design, behind a sheet of Perspex, has a muffled, colourless quality.

Neilson stops short of glamorising her disorder, but as Lisa lies in bed, leaden, medicated, almost stripped of autonomy by the gently efficient medical staff, the stark contrast with _Dissocia’s _terrors and exhilarations is agonising. Life on prescribed drugs offers nothing to compare with her earlier adventures; she can’t even set out on a quest along the corridor unaccompanied.

When the play is at its most hectic, dramatic impetus and intensity occasionally get lost in the mayhem. But this is a work that genuinely pushes at the limits of dramatic form, and while it’s wayward at times, it’s hugely exciting.

5 stars Rachel Halliburton, Time Out, 3 April

This hallucinogenic ride through the dark night of the soul is extraordinary. Shatteringly original, infuriating, rebelliously playful, and as intelligently experimental as any drama you’ll see, it takes the audience member on a journey where it’s impossible to feel in control. Since it premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2004 critics have grappled to pin down its influences: ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, David Lynch, ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’, and even ‘Star Wars’ have been cited. The connecting strand, of course, for all these is a fascination with the joys and fears of disorientation a theme Anthony Neilson deploys very cleverly to examine the allure and desperation of mental illness.

As the play opens, Christine Entwistle’s engagingly childlike Lisa is sitting onstage plucking petulantly at one string on a guitar. Tightening the string till it breaks, it’s obvious that something else has snapped, as Barnaby Power’s Sigmund Freud-like watch-mender enters to inform her that she has somehow managed to lose an hour of her life. Her flat becomes a lift, and the curtain flies up to reveal a carpet-covered world inhabited by such characters as the Insecurity Guards, Alan Francis’ comically imposing Oath-taker, and a rapist scapegoat. The play’s dynamic swings constantly between joy and terror, as songs and child-like hilarity are overshadowed by the threat of the Black Dog King.

Neilson himself directs with considerable flair. It’s arguable that his excellent production allows him to get away with some of the weaknesses of the script the jokes, though very good, are repeatedly overplayed. In the brilliantly contrasting second half, where we find ourselves in the amplified monochrome monotony of a psychiatric hospital, he makes us feel how Lisa might long for an escape from sanity. Yet again, the National Theatre of Scotland brings a fresh blast of air to the London stage.

Like Alice in Wonderland directed by David Lynch

Mark Brown, The Telegraph, 6 March

When the National Theatre of Scotland (which recently celebrated its first year on the public stage) announced that it was reviving Anthony Neilson’s extraordinary play The Wonderful World of Dissocia, it signalled its welcome intention to bring the real gems of contemporary Scottish theatre to new and wider audiences. Neilson’s tragicomic journey through the mind (and, ultimately, the deadening medical suppression) of someone with psychosis, was, justly, the toast of the 2004 Edinburgh Festival, and the winner of a clutch of awards.

This NTS staging is, effectively, a carbon copy of the presentation of three years ago (which was a collaboration between the Edinburgh International Festival, Glasgow’s Tron Theatre and the Drum Theatre, Plymouth). That, one should add, is no bad thing – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, as the saying goes. This revival (directed, as in 2004, by the playwright himself) has lost none of the piece’s capacity for searing originality, entertaining and powerful humour, and deeply affecting emotion.

A play of two very distinct halves, the first part of *Dissocia *finds us inside the psychosis of the drama’s protagonist Lisa (Christine Entwisle, superb in her return to the role). Like _Alice in Wonderland _directed by David Lynch, Lisa travels to the partitioned, war-ravaged nation of Dissocia in search of the “lost hour” which will restore balance to her life. While there, the brilliantly conceived characters she meets give vivid expression to the physically and sexually violent horrors, but also the absurdist fun, faced by the psychotic mind.

If Neilson’s alternative world is a stunning work of imagination, the second half of the play – in which Lisa, now in hospital, is returned to medicated “normality” – creates a juddering atmospheric shift. Told from the perspective of Lisa as patient, it provides a sobering insight into why a person with psychosis might be attracted to her condition and repulsed by the medication which not only suppresses her illness, but also deadens her mind.

Brilliantly acted by an excellent ensemble (Barnaby Power’s Swiss watchmaker Victor Hesse is especially delicious), with two wonderfully contrasting sets by Miriam Buether, this simultaneously joyous and saddening play deserves the wider audience this tour provides. More than that, it also deserves to be considered a modern classic.

5 stars Maxie Szalwinska, Metro, 3 April

Anthony Neilson’s 2004 play finally gets a London run in a staging so good it makes you want to burst out cheering.

In The Wonderful World… Neilson has found his own distinctive, light way of being serious. What the playwright achieves in this breezy, ominous work is a kind of hallucinated realism. It’s the sort of play you go on seeing after you’ve got home and closed your eyes.

Our heroine is Lisa (the beautifully low-key Christine Entwisle), a young woman with dissociative identity disorder. She embarks on a quest to find the hour she lost when the clocks changed, and her flat becomes an elevator that takes her to Dissocia, an Alice In wonderland-like kingdom peopled by ‘insecurity guards’, a singing polar bear and an archfiend, known as the Black Dog King. Neilson’s cuckoo-land somehow makes absolute sense. While the first half, with its mixture of comedy, dream and underlay of dread, is a rhapsody on mental illness, the second half brings the audience, and Lisa, crashing down to earth. A series of short, sharp vignettes in a mental hospital contrast Lisa’s vivid internal landscape with the outer world.

Dexterously directed by the playwright for the National Theatre Of Scotland, this is the most attentive foray into crack-up youre likely to see.