View from the Green Room: Disturbing thoughts
Steven Walsh's Maggot Mind, part of the Lunchtime Theatre Series at St Patrick's Gateway Centre.
Steven Walsh’s Jonathan has OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And today’s leaflet goes into great detail to explain the condition and the maelstrom of familial emotion that charges outwards from it.
OCD can destroy the love and connection between family members who cannot understand or tolerate the condition.
Jonathan hates dirt. He’s actually terrified of it. Smelling it…feeling it… discarding it. Ironically his flat is an absolute tip that would need people in protective overalls to dispose of its contents.
His mother is in hospital. She’s dying and crying out to see him. Voices reverberate in his consciousness and become a continuous scream of accusations. And he can’t stop them. Voiceovers that whirl around his subconscious mind are contradictory. His sister loves him although she doesn’t understand him and pleads with him to come to see his mother. His brother is hostile and threatening. He accuses him of being hateful, spiteful, insensitive, cruel, uncaring and downright evil. Oh…and he also hates his girlfriend…whatever her name is.
Her name is Phoenix and she’s a mannequin to whom he speaks and showers love on. Stephen Walsh’s script is clever. The unspeaking Phoenix becomes us – the audience – and her confidences become ours.
There’s a lot going on in Jonathan’s mind and none of it is good. He’s showering six times a day and spends hours afterwards scrubbing the walls for fear of infection. He has minute statistics on the dangers of infection and reveals that it’s everywhere. Touching his dying mother would bring about his own death.
Writer Steven Walsh drills down into the nature of OCD and brings it alive front and centre in a way that no research or description could. Jonathan’s OCD becomes our OCD because we’re locked inside Jonathan’s thought process. It’s a searing journey that doesn’t take prisoners.
Fear is never rational. Things that go bump in the night…the noise behind the locked door…midnight callers. There may be a perfectly rational explanation if your mind is a rational one but Jonathan’s mind is anything but.
Steven Walsh’s drama may be short but it’s an uncomfortable and intense experience that’s well-staged and performed. The bleakness of the script and the filth of his surroundings offers little escape to the audience. We need contrast, however, to appreciate the darkness. Maggot Mind is a script that needs some shade to lift the overwhelming feeling of doom and gloom.
I look forward to seeing more of Stephen’s work.
