The upstairs room of the Lass O’Gowrie, to my mind the smallest venue in town, has a tiny lit stage, and rows of around forty chairs, to which Greg Saxton steps up boldly. Introducing his one-man show, How I Went Insane, Saxton informs us, with Victorian candour, that what follows will be a series of ‘revelations’ pieced together from memories, diary entries and letters to parents. He apologises that these aspects of ‘human frailty’ can be ‘obtruding on our notice’.
A monologue of drug-induced moments of euphoria, of multiple epiphanies and their rapid (and as quickly forgotten) succession is absorbing, even allowing for the trance music backing. But this feeling is curtailed from the offset, where he describes himself as ‘staring up at the ceiling of my friend’s flat, again’. This follows his father’s advice to be with friends, and Saxton’s letter stating he is ‘crucified’. So, clearly his sanity, emotional state, and drug taking are not healthy, as he and the audience are projected into a world of opiate-fuelled parties and club scenes. Here, his increasing exasperation is fuelled and he unleashes a deluge of anger and dismay, targetting the world at large, including amongst others consumer society’s charity bids from ‘Bob Fucking Geldof’.
Before the inevitable comedown to the lonelier recesses of a dishevelled room and mind, his journey home is bombarded with billboards in a cold concrete jungle. Familiar to anyone feeling deadbeat after a night out, let alone a cocktail of mind-bending drugs (or so I am lead to believe), they meet his mind’s eye as onslaughts of futility, of ‘what we have become’ as the despairing thoughts of fragile sanity spiral into meltdown.
Aside from claiming to have left his head in the toilet cubicle of a former club, described as ‘vacant’, How I Went Insane is wrongly billed as ‘comedy’ drama. His performance is compelling, not least due to the fact that he has created an intense portrayal of curtailed mental health condensed into twenty minutes of engaging yet dark poetry and prose, performed to an atmospheric and well composed soundtrack, worthy of the £2 entry fee. A party of chance latecomers, however, were clearly disgruntled.
No comments:
Post a Comment