Some Demon by Laura Waldren is a gem of a play that examines the techniques of manipulation and bullying practised by shrinks on anorexics. The setting is an NHS referral unit where Sam, an 18-year-old philosophy student, arrives with a minor eating disorder. Like every patient, Sam is told that her personality is immersed in a civil war and that two implacable forces – the ‘diseased self’ and the ‘whole self’ – are fighting for control of her destiny. It’s a brilliantly simple trick that any bully can learn in a few minutes. If the patient says something unwelcome, the shrink ascribes the statement to the ‘diseased self’ and adds: ‘I don’t negotiate with the disease.’
It seems astonishing that vulnerable patients are placed in the hands of twisted control freaks
The patient is taught to suppress the ‘diseased self’ and to act on behalf of the ‘whole self’, which happens to reflect the shrink’s interests. Thus the patient is mentally enslaved by the shrink who can swat away any challenge by claiming that it represents ‘the disease’. Physical coercion is practised too. At group sessions, the patients may not swear, fidget, shield their faces with their hands or lean back in their chairs. Their diet, of course, is rigorously policed as well. Shrinks who are irritated or confronted by a patient can expel the nuisance by calling the police and crying ‘trespass’. And they have the option of incarcerating (or ‘sectioning’) the patient by signing a few medical forms.
When Sam arrives, she’s excited by the prospect of studying at Hull University and she sits in the common room reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. But when she learns that the shrinks (who call themselves ‘the care team’) have the power to imprison her and to ruin her future she suffers a panic attack and passes out on the non-slip tiles. Her story is contrasted with the anguish of Zoe, an older patient, who has spent decades ‘bingeing and purging’, and whose multiple stints in the unit have turned her into an emotional wreck. The shrinks and the inmates are now a substitute family which conveniently hides her real problem: no kids, no partner, no career, no purpose in life.
It seems astonishing that these brainwashing units are allowed to exist and that vulnerable inmates are placed in the hands of twisted control freaks. The government wants to fund more of these pain factories – which are worse than the nastiest boarding school – and it intends to fill the wards by promoting mental instability as a social accomplishment.
Waldren’s play is commendably even-handed, and it explores the emotional background of the shrinks in order to explain how they ended up as therapists. It’s not a perfect drama: the intensity diminishes noticeably in Act Two, but that’s a minor failing. It feels like a ready-made TV project. Any Netflix executive looking for a hit series will want to commission this on the spot. They’ll want to keep the cast too. They’re all excellent. And they’re good-looking – which helps on telly.
August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is one of the easiest plays to mishandle. Directors assume that because it’s a ‘classic romance’ it can be set anywhere; but it needs to be located, as this production is, in a wealthy household in the final years of the 19th century just as the moribund nobility was being challenged by the muscular and energetic peasant class.
Jean is an ambitious young footman who has acquired the polish of his superiors by eavesdropping on their conversation and copying their manners. He works for a count whose beautiful daughter, Miss Julie, can’t find a husband because she hates men. Unfortunately, she also lusts after them. Having rejected a rich suitor by humiliating him in public, she consoles herself by targeting the sexy Jean in the kitchen where he works. To make her conquest sweeter she seduces him in front of his lover, the cook. But their one-night stand races out of control and they realise that they face ruin unless they skip the country. So they hatch a mad plan to emigrate to the Italian Alps and open a hotel using Miss Julie’s money. The twists and turns of their attempts to save themselves are harrowing and utterly riveting to watch.
This is a play that has everything: romance, poetry, eroticism, emotional violence and half a dozen astonishing narrative reversals. And there’s bloodshed too: a pet greenfinch is beheaded on the kitchen table with a meat cleaver. It’s also extremely funny because the characters keep pushing themselves to the furthest limits of human conduct – as in a sketch routine.
Katie Eldred and Freddie Wise are superb as the madcap voluptuaries. They look like rock stars and they carry themselves with the right sort of diabolical insouciance. Adeline Waby supports brilliantly as the redoubtable cook. This show is so exhilarating that you leave the theatre feeling flat and spent, and with a weird desire to go back in and watch the love-struck maniacs tackle the assault course all over again.
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