1. Comedy in a care home – Care Home Tour

“Dementia doesn’t smother their capacity to feel joy” says Liam ‘Pope’ Lonergan, a part-time standup comic and full-time carer. He co-organised a troupe to perform The Care Home Tour, a comedy gig for residents with and without dementia at the Madelayne Court Care Home in Chelmsford, Essex, in October. It combined physical comedy, clowning, stand-up and interactive games.

“People treat their elderly residents like potted plants: make sure they’re watered and keep them out of direct sunlight,” says Lonergan. “Having worked as a care assistant for nearly five years – interacting with them, consoling them, being shown around the neighbourhood of their memories, I can assure you that their twilight years aren’t just a protracted terminus. Dementia is about living in, and so for, the moment. This coincides with live comedy where a big part of the thrill is the spontaneity and precariousness of the moment.”

Image: Care Home Tour

2. Theatre about mental health – Acting Now

Cambridge-based theatre company Acting Now unites adults with and without mental health challenges to explore the subject and its enduring taboos. Participants on its Making Changes programme attend weekly drama sessions. “The group has become family and helped them to improve their lives at different levels,” says Marina Pallarès Elias, Acting Now founder and artistic director.

Image: Acting Now

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3. Singing for wellbeing – Harmony Choir

Established in 2016 to inform University of Edinburgh research into how singing together improves mental health, Harmony Choir is still going strong. Some choir members have experience with mental illness and the group aims to reduce the stigma associated with such conditions. Members were asked to rate their wellbeing and connectedness before and after rehearsals: all improved after singing.

Image: John Glynn

4. Reading as therapy – The Reader

The Reader charity pioneers Shared Reading – “a simple idea that changes lives”. They bring people together to read literature – from novels to poetry – to help improve wellbeing and reduce social isolation. “Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who had ever been alive,” said US author James Baldwin.

Image: The Reader

5. Moving for the mind – Company Chameleon

Kevin Turner co-founded Manchester-based dance company Company Chameleon. Inspired by his own experience with bipolar disorder, Turner teamed up with young people’s mental health charity 42nd Street to explore how dance can build trust and confidence – without needing words. The resulting production, Witness, portrays Turner’s experience of his breakdown and inspired a follow-up project at a mental health care unit.

Image: Joel Chester Fildes

Featured image: Joel Chester Fildes

This article is featured in issue 92 of Positive News magazine. Subscribe now to get the magazine delivered to your door each quarter.

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Theatre only comes alive in the presence of an audience: it depends on an interaction between someone who tells a story and someone who listens and watches. It seeks to provoke an emotional and intellectual reaction, and as such it is an inherently political medium. It is also an art form entirely based on the concept of change. Plots are set in motion by an alteration in the characters’ circumstances, and their story can’t come to an end before the characters have changed too.

It seems then that drama is a particularly appropriate tool to bring about change in society. This is the premise that led director Annemiek van Elst to found And Many Others. This theatre company is dedicated to telling stories overlooked by mainstream media and aims to create social change by fostering understanding and compassion.

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Becoming Mohammed, the company’s most recent production and one which I wrote the script for, was inspired by van Elst’s experience of coming to terms with her younger brother Maarten’s conversion to Islam while in his late teens.

As the youngest member of a Dutch atheist family who had never had any contact with Islam, he shocked his parents by announcing his conversion. While Maarten’s choice first caused tension and misunderstanding, especially as everyone was confronted with their own prejudice, it also brought the family closer together.

Our intent with the show was to tell a story about a conversion to Islam that did not involve explosives

Although inspired by real events, the play is largely fictional. It deals with Islam and conversion, but it is, above all, a story about acceptance and the bond between siblings.

For us it was extremely important to make a show that presented conversion in a positive light. In fact, while Islam frequently features on screen, stage and page, most of the time it is in relation to terrorism, or as a device to justify a character’s fears and prejudice. This hugely affects people’s perception of the religion.

The director herself was surprised by her reaction to her brother’s conversion, which was all the stronger because of how personal it felt. In hindsight, she realised her understanding of Islam had been affected and warped by years of negative representations of Islam in the media. Our intent with the show was to both tell a story about conversion that did not involve explosives, and to offer support to the families of converts, or reverts.

A scene from the play Becoming Mohammed

Reversion is a difficult process to go through for both converts and their families. The former might find themselves stuck between two worlds while feeling like they do not quite belong in either, and are in fact often described as a minority within a minority. Families, on the other hand, might perceive their beloved’s conversion as a loss, as the person they used to know embraces a new way of life. We wanted to show that, while challenging, this process can also be joyful. We wanted to show that it can also be an opportunity to learn about a different culture and to become a more compassionate, more understanding and ultimately richer human being as a result.

In theatre, the act of putting certain characters or stories on stage makes them visible to an audience who might ignore or fear them

Storytelling can be a powerful political act when it challenges preconceptions and stereotypes. In theatre, the act of putting certain characters or stories on stage legitimises them: it makes them visible to an audience who might ignore or fear them.

Representation is a catalyst for social change, and a powerful tool in the hands of writers and artists, especially in a moment in history where many seem to be cynical about politics but are open to being challenged and moved by entertainment.

Storytellers have both the power and a responsibility to strive towards challenging prejudice and changing the way we look at diversity.

Images: Claudia Marinaro

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Directed by Rufus Norris and cleverly adapted by David Hare from Katherine Boo’s bestselling book, it depicts the real-life experiences of families living in makeshift homes in Annawadi, one of many slums that lie in the shadow of the sprawling Mumbai airport and surrounding hotels. It’s difficult to imagine a more graphic and vivid display of the division of equality than this.

The deafening sound of a plane taking off echoes around the auditorium at the same time as its shadow seemingly flies directly over us in the audience at the National Theatre. Soon after hundreds of plastic bottles crash onto the stage falling amongst other rubbish and the cast. The cluttered set is busy with striking juxtapositions such as shiny billboards featuring Bollywood stars above the corrugated metal of the improvised roofs below. It’s details like this that helps bring both the harsh realities and hustle and bustle of Annawadi to London, and make it a spectacle well worth going to see.

It’s difficult at moments to remember that the scenes on stage are based on a non-fiction book rather than a novel. Events – such as when a woman sets herself on fire – are all the more difficult to stomach when you know it actually happened. Perhaps almost as shocking is the level of corruption that’s demonstrated – something the book shows to an even more devastating extent. For anyone who has ever donated to charities who provide aid to India, it makes for uncomfortable viewing.

But despite the disbelief the audience may feel, it’s the hope and compassion that both stand out and those are the feelings I carry home with me. There’s the touching scenes of the girls who meet in the toilet block so one can teach the other about plays she has read at school; the entrepreneurial rubbish picker who decides to take the moral high ground and refuse any stolen goods despite the profit it will make; the injustice of the court system finally being set right and the hope that soon, just around the corner, there may be some escape.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers runs at the National Theatre until 13 April 2015.

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The most extraordinary thing about this production is the way that the grizzled, rasping, inhuman puppet at the heart of it transforms before the audience into a living, touching and tender human being by its close.

The premise is simple: “Could you kill someone?” asks the withered Roger of his new carer, a young man, played by Graham Dron, before descending into an attack of violent, disturbing coughing, drawn out to great effect. Billy must decide how far his duties as a carer should go towards his suffering, terminally ill friend.

It is this conundrum that the audience is drawn into, as Roger’s craggy features and brash, uncaring facade soften into those of a suffering old man and Billy grapples with his initial distaste.

The convincing puppetry of Nicholas Halliwell and Louisa Ashton, along with the creative talent of prop-maker and director, Shelley Knowles-Dixon, are quite astonishing and you could be forgiven for thinking that there is someone hidden within a costume, acting independently in front of you. All the while, the live music supplied by Lawrence Illsley on the guitar, coupled with the low-level lighting, provides an edge to the atmosphere in the theatre as the performance reaches its chilling climax.

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By this time, we have come to know Roger, have taken a welcome glimpse into the happier days of his past and become used to his Scots drawl and uncompromising manner, but also vividly aware of his pain and frustration. He has become a living individual.

Sparkle and Dark productions should be proud of the compelling manner in which they have been able to portray the sombre issue of euthanasia by sparking life into a fundamentally lifeless puppet.

Killing Roger is no longer running, but Sparkle and Dark will be launching a new production in the coming months. Check their website for updates.

The post Review: Killing Roger – Greenwich Theatre, London appeared first on Positive News.

In her hit song If I were a Boy, Beyoncé trills: “I’d roll out of bed in the morning, and throw on what I wanted, and go drink beer with the guys.” Sure, it’s just a catchy pop song, but how far can women understand the intricacies of men beyond lazy stereotypes?

Director Raisa Breslava created WIMP after feeling compelled to explore and celebrate the “shamefully hidden sides of a man.” In the programme notes she describes her passion to understand the men she loves. She writes: “I want to relate deeply to a man and in order to do so I want to see more of him. I want to get to know his vulnerabilities, how he feels, what excites him and what shuts him down.”

This one-man show is performed with a gut-wrenching honesty by Vincent Manna. WIMP begins with a very masculine feat of physicality as Manna slowly and smoothly perfects a press-up while perched on a table. His experience with dance company Rambert and choreographer Matthew Bourne is instantly apparent. It’s the confident display of a man, who we witness slowly unwrap.
The character’s steady public face acts as narrator, a 40-year-old who’s trying to survive the loneliness of a long-distance relationship. But we are exposed in turn to his many sides: an angry man, a cripplingly anxious man, a virulent man, a jealous man and a naive, trusting man.

“Performed with a gut-wrenching honesty we are exposed in turn to his many sides: an angry man, a cripplingly anxious man, a virulent man, a jealous man and a naive, trusting man”

The audience is seated in two semicircles in the stunning Asylum chapel in South London, and it makes for an intimate gathering. Manna takes full advantage of our proximity, talking and interacting directly with the audience. The space is in the middle of early 18th century almshouses that, despite the ‘Asylum’ moniker, were homes for retired pub landlords. The chapel has itself long been retired and never fully recovered structurally from WW2 bomb damage. A word of warning: wear warm clothes as it does get chilly.

The set design is sparse but the atmospheric venue needs little dressing or fancy set pieces and designer Bianca Turner responds with a delicate touch. A congregation of translucent balloons appear caught in mid air at the pulpit, small lights twinkling beneath. And the musical score from Jamie Catto, a founding member of Faithless and co-creator of the film 1 Giant Leap, performs its own dance with Manna. This marriage is especially effective in the touching finale.

It is truly frightening when Manna first exposes his insecure self, bending and jerking with Ian Curtis style-spasms. And as with the Joy Division frontman, he is utterly watchable. The speed with which Manna switches between characters is both impressive and unnerving. We are also introduced to a posturing, violent, peacocking man who struts and thrusts around the space. It’s rather delicious when Manna uses every inch of his body to bellow “cunt”. In turn frightening and hilarious, his cocky self moves through a throng of partygoers (represented by the balloons), feeding them ludicrous chat-up lines, at one point straddling two balloons – twins – grinding against them both.

Admittedly a personal peeve, the baby-voice chatter Manna used when portraying childhood memories and the ever-present inner child, grated and took a while to warm to. But the actor’s utter commitment to his role was powerful. A balloon – that a moment ago was a metal detector – becomes a living and breathing girlfriend. And suddenly he has her in a headlock. It’s hard not to wince as he repeatedly, and menacingly, applies pressure on ‘her’.

It takes a great bravery to expose the extremes of ourselves, those facets that are universal and yet universally hidden. An assured debut from Breslava, WIMP is a compassionate and urgent dissection of masculinity. Must-see.

WIMP runs until 22nd September at the Asylum, Caroline Garden’s Chapel, London, SE15 2SQ. Show time: 7pm. Matinee on 22nd September at 2pm. Tickets £10/£7. Age restriction: 16  wimptheatre.com

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