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Response by Imogen Sotos-Castello (20-Oct-03) [ Young Critics' Circle Review ]
I was asked to see Mr Dupont today. He is a man of 50 years but is still stuck in 1963. In 1963b he sustained his severe head injury. His history suggests that his injuries found on his head and body when he was hit by a car on his way out of La Rochelle outside the train station where we assume he was planning to return to Paris where he was a medical student.
Numerous tests were undertaken through structured questioning today but he still believes he is a 23 year old living in Paris in 1963. Showing him his reflection with the mirror I provided made him deeply troubled for a time but after I changed the subject he forgot about this almost immediately.
Using repetition to enter his consciousness saying ‘La Rochelle’ and ordering him to repeat it he was still convinced he was currently in Paris and was aware he had visited La Rochelle once to meet his lover in 1963. He fails to maintain a concept of time and also of what he has seen. For example he denied ever seeing the sea even on his 1963 visit to La Rochelle. I took him to the sea side today where he was transfixed by the images and yet within minutes forgot what he had seen and was again convinced he had never seen the sea before.
By Rebecca Cooke from The Nottingham Emmanuel (20-Oct-03) [ Young Critics' Circle Review ]
Personally I didn’t enjoy ‘The Man Who’ and felt it was not suitable for children as it dealt with adult issues that made me feel confused. Although I think only a minority of adults would enjoy it, I do think that people in the medical profession would find it interesting. I thought the setting was really good but it hardly ever changed. There were only four characters and they all acted well, however I believe it should have been narrated to prevent confusion. I noticed there were very few people in the audience and this may have reflected the amount of people who had enjoyed it on previous nights.
There was a bit of swearing but I believe that it would have been hard for the director to avoid, as it was part of a mental illness. The costumes where simple and accurate and I liked the way the characters efficiently changed from a patient to a doctor. There was a really good part where a doctor was filming a patient drawing circles and they showed it on a TV at the back of the stage. Overall I thought the scenes where too short and didn’t seem to relate much of the story.
By Rebecca Cooke from The Nottingham Emmanuel
Response by Robyn Wilson (20-Oct-03) [ Young Critics' Circle Review ]
bThe man from La Rochelle
I went to the doctor today,
Told him want I’d done,
"Nothin much" I said and then he tapped me on th ’ead,
and then I start’d to say what I ’ad done today;
"Paris" I cried.
The doctor then sighed and tapped me again on th ’ead,
"I have a picture, faint, but clear, of the sea" said I,
"It’s...." I paused I had forgotten,
it was there, but now it’s rotten,
I must of thrown it away.
He turned and replied "Have you learnt it yet?."
I looked at him oddly.
"Learnt what?" I replied back
"The story I told you just now."
Now it weren’t just me, I didn’t hear no sto-ry!
I have a great memory, does I.
And don’t forget things that come and go by!
So it ain’t fair to go trick- in me!
By Robyn Wilson
Response by Anna Murphy (20-Oct-03)
ME
All people have problems in life,
I mean fucking hell; we’re all human, right?
But this problem bastards wish they had,
To swear, to curse, to ’talk bad’.
Hey! My teachers thought I was pissing about,
My mother used to cry,
The priest used to shit himself,
When I would say fucking ’hi’.
There are thousands of tickers,
Thousands of fucking doctors too,
But they only see the condition,
They never see bloody you.
Did I tell you this about this one fucking time?
I went to the cinema (yes it’s true),
But the attendants told me to ’eff off’,
So I ran off and hid in the loo.
They found me soon enough,
I mean, my tics aren’t that fucking still,
So outside I was thrown and they fucking swore:
’Any more trouble and we’ll call the Old Bill’.
But on I will soldier,
My problem is not me,
But the fucking problems of the Great British public,
And the taboos of which they see.
For the Queen does fucking fart:
And I will continue to tic,
Stop seeing the problem, but the person behind,
Because your attitudes make me sick.
The way they fucking look,
The bloody cunts just can’t see,
That yes, I AM A PERSON,
Hey! I’M FUCKING ME.
Theatre World Internet Magazine (09-Oct-03)
The UK's premier Internet Theatre Magazine
Nottingham Playhouse The Man Who
By Oliver Sacks, Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne
Director Giles Croft
It takes a brave regional theatre to stage a work such as The Man Who, a series of interlinking scenes focussing on the behaviour and treatment of people who have different types of brain disorder, based on Oliver Sacks’ book of neurological studies. Heavy going? Not at all. Nottingham Playhouse is adept at choosing a wide and challenging programme for its audience and this play, untouched since 1994, fully repays the confidence and direction which Giles Croft gives it to offer us much more than an excellent night’s entertainment.
This is a stark production - seamless, moving from one case study to the next and no interval. Helen Davies has cleverly designed a clinical set with minimalist décor and a backdrop of windowpanes used as a projection screen to support the action. Croft uses the actors to video their patients’ behaviour and we see this as it is happening, on large television screens, creating a double take on the action. He succeeds in his desire to make the drama ‘feel more harsh, more clinical’. Good lighting by Richard Jones enhances the mood and supports the transition from one situation to the next.
Mention must be made of all four actors - Robin Harvey Edwards, Jonathan Oliver, Alan Perrin and Anthony Taylor - who played a multitude of parts so smoothly that it is impossible to single one out from the other for individual praise. As the doctors and patients they present the situation to us - leaving us to make what we will of each case study.
The key point for me, in using material like this as a base for drama, is how effective theatre can be as a means of educating an audience in what is a massively complex area - the way the brain controls the body and how out of step we are when it becomes dysfunctional and out of sync. Drama educates powerfully both intellectually and emotionally, as we start to relate our experience of the mentally ill to the case studies before us. We see examples daily of these people, outcast, on our streets - locked in their own worlds, unable to be understood or to relate. Perhaps seeing such a powerful play on neurological studies will help us to look with different eyes on the case studies we ourselves encounter in real life.
Unusual and thought provoking drama. Catch it while you can!
The Man Who is playing from Friday 3 - Saturday 18 October Tickets: from £5 (concessions available)
For information and booking, call the Box Office on 0115 9419419
Elaine Peel
Nottingham Evening Post Review (08-Oct-03)
BARELY KNOWING THEIR OWN MINDS
Ninety minutes of fragmented neurological dysfunction doesn't sound like much of a night out, does it? Not outside the ranks of CAMRA, at least.
But Playhouse artistic director Giles Croft's production The Man Who does more than just turn neurologist Oliver Sacks' case studies into vivid, pure theatre - it makes you think about the way you see the world.
Based on Sacks' celebrated bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, this is a revival of a work by Sacks, theatrical genius Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne. There is no over-arching storyline, just an episodic series of portraits of brain disorders by four actors on Helen Davies' single set.
Robin Harvey Edwards, Jonathan Oliver, Alan Perrin and Anthony Taylor skilfully switch between portrayals of doctors and a wide array of patients. At first, I feared this would be bitty and unsatisfying, that we were being invited to laugh at the misfortunes of the afflicted.
But Croft avoids ridiculing his subjects - just as he rejects easy or sentimental emotional cues - and the evening is as moving as it is though-provoking.
It’s perhaps surprising that there aren't more plays or works of art dealing with the brain. Most people would probably conclude that, in most respects, they are their brains, yet few of us know much about how they work.
Some of the fragments raise a laugh - the Scottish Tourette's syndrome sufferer who knows every historical and medical fact about his condition, but just can't stop swearing, for one. Some are pure tragedy - the man who mistakes his wife for a hat movingly confesses that his other half's face, which eventually becomes visually unrecognisable to him, consequently holds "no meaning" for him.
Sometimes you simply don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sufferers of Broca's aphasia can construct complex sentences, but don't realise they are speaking indecipherable jargon. A scene in which a patient reads Gray's Elegy in this knotted Stanley Unwin style is a virtuoso piece of comic acting by Edwards (stunning throughout). But when he hears a recording of his recitation, he collapses in tears and confusion in an eerie, resonant moment reminiscent of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
These people are not mad; the mechanisms by which they perceive the world are just damaged. To them, it is the world which has changed.
An ambitious work, it stretches the mind and heart and leaves you wondering how tight anyone's grip on reality can really be. Full credit to the Playhouse for staging it.
BBC Online (08-Oct-03)
The play directed by Giles Croft, and written by Oliver sacks and Peter Brooks, is an hour or so, of let’s say, profound madness?
The Plot
There is no plot! Not in its traditional sense anyway.
We’re taken through 17 scenes each dealing with a different human condition of the mind including: Tourette’s Syndrome, Autism and Agnosia.
The Verdict
To define The Man Who’s genre you’d have to put it between the comic and the tragic.
Some scenes could easily be sketches by the Monty Python team while others are really quite sad and disturbing.
An example of the comic would be a man with visual agnosia - a condition where patients have severe visual field defects.
The doctor lifts up the man’s right arm and says: "who’s is this?" the patient replies, "it’s mine of course", the doctor lifts up his left arm: "what about this?" the man replies, "that’s my mother’s." Comically it’s brilliant, without being offensive.
There’s another scene where a man with Tourette’s syndrome addresses the audience like a stand-up comedian, and if anything, his turn raises the awareness of his condition which would normally be discussed behind closed doors.
However, it’s not all laughs. One scene involves a man with proprioception: a condition where a patient doesn’t recognise his own limbs.
When placed in bed by two doctors he sees his left leg, he hits it in horror and screams, believing they'd placed an amputated leg in his bed.
All four actors are a delight to watch, swapping from their roles as patients to roles as psychiatrists, switching from being funny to being serious.
The Man Who is 90 minutes long, with the same set and no real idea how it will conclude, you would think it could be become tiresome.
However, the time flies by because it’s so absorbing. The Man Who is a brilliant piece of theatre and you must go and see it.
4/5
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