Theatre review: The Mirror Stage is an impressive exploration of psychosis
The Mirror Stage: Kévin Coquelard, Diarmuid Armstrong, Bun Kobayashi, Carolina Wilkinson. Picture: Ste Murray
★★★★☆
For the past 25 years Brokentalkers, the company run by Gary Keegan and Feidlim Cannon, have used their inventive approach to theatre to shine a light on dark corners of society, or to give voices to the marginalised.
Their work has consistently married deep research with eclectic invention. gave tender musical life to the experiences of older Irish gay men; confronted the trauma of residential care abuse; exposed failures in the prison system. If such subjects could be easily guessed at, their manifestation on stage has often made for startling, original, and profoundly human theatre.
continues this tradition at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, before traveling to the Everyman in Cork later this month. The project began when a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland saw and invited Keegan and Donlon to collaborate on exploring psychosis, and what it feels like to live with it.
Over several years, Brokentalkers gathered testimony from 15 people who have experienced psychosis. Yet, rather than represent these stories through actors or fictionalised scenes, Keegan and Donlon took the suggestion of one participant and began to put dance at the heart of it. The piece thus unfolds as a kind of dialogue between recorded voices, music, projected imagery, and the physical language of movement.
Four performers – Diarmuid Armstrong, Kevin Coquelard, Bun Kobayashi, and Carolina Wilkinson – move around, before, and behind Sabine Dargent’s set, dominated by a large, square screen. Frenetic bursts of movement, squished body parts, repeated gestures, and abrupt stillnesses evoke the disorientation of fractured perception. All against Valgeir Sigurdsson’s compositions. Random video collages by Jose Miguel Jimenez flicker past at bewildering speed, visualising the loss of contact with reality.
Psychosis, we are shown, is not simply in the mind; it is something lived through the body. The testimonies we hear of dissociation and paranoia are stark; the accounts of isolation and stigma heartbreaking; what “hearing” voices is actually like is terrifyingly explained. Put it this way: there’s a lot more to it than “hearing”.
Yet is not unrelentingly bleak. A riff on the pre-show safety announcement is, from the outset, a marker of the show’s lively wit. And later, there comes recovery, resilience, and reconnection.
In its closing moments, the screen fills with the face of one participant: a young woman named Nicola, who sings for us. Thus any abstraction resolves into a person, specific and real. It’s a quintessential Brokentalkers gesture: to return us to the individual, the antithesis of stereotype or academic study.
With Brokentalkers again remind us that theatre can do more than simply tell us about others’ experiences – it can represent them in evocative, and beautiful ways. A powerful experience
- At Project Arts Centre until November 12. Everyman Cork, on Tuesday, November 18
