Comedy review – Footlights want to fix your brain
After being shortlisted for Best Newcomer at Brighton Fringe (England’s largest arts festival), Fix My Brain, a new comedy about mental health and depression, written by two former President of the Cambridge Footlights Presidents, (a society which counts Olivia Colman and Richard Ayoade among its alumni) Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, made a successful debut at the Fringe last year and returned to London for a brief run at The Vaults in Waterloo last week.
Whereas much of the near-past of British comedy has dramatized mental health by proxy (there is only one episode in nine series of Peep Show that explicitly talks about therapy), this is a piece of theatre that takes on themes of mental disintegration with a pleasing directness.
Dillon and Oliver are housemates. Dillon is suffering from depression. We follow him exploring various routes out of his condition, in which the whole architecture of modern therapy practice is pushed into various comic absurdities – mindfulness (ends in Dillon trying to finish a Sudoku, while knitting, on a tread mill), online CBT (falls in love with an online bot who replies in template answers) and face-to-face encounters with medical professionals (his therapist can only quote motivational maxims from the Batman trilogy).
In each new scenario, we see Dillon trying, and failing, to alleviate his mental state. His travails are played out through the pair’s rather quixotic dynamic: Dillon is a frustrated artist; Oliver a trainee doctor. The two play off each other well and it’s a combination that neatly unites on stage different contemporary ideas on how best to alleviate depressive moods. Oliver instinctively medicalises Dillon’s thought processes – “fill out this form”, “book an appointment with a therapist” – while Dillon tries to draw on what’s left of his creative drives by becoming obsessed with the idea of winning a short film competition.
Dillon speaks to his inner “abyss”, which reminds him of how he kicked a fellow pupil in primary school. Both characters end up making short films: Dillon a mock-serious existentialist drama – a cross turns into a condom, a hand reaches down to pick up a bank note revealing CAPITALISM daubed on an arm as the shirt sleeve slips upwards; while Oliver satirizes zany Zombie flicks (“only a dead man can make the undead, undead”).
The play is full of finely-wrought flights of fancy, which succeed in showing, with great sensitivity, that the frightening first-hand experience of the classic symptoms of clinical depression – obsessive thought patterns, lurid, phantasmagorical images, intense, and paralysing anxiety – really can be brightened by laughter.