This one turned out to be rather timely for me,
albeit a bit indirectly - a four-hander playing out the interactions of two
participants in a drug trial who fall in love but then can’t be sure whether their feelings are real
or drug-induced (and whether it matters anyway), their psychiatrist whose
personal history of mental health and romantic difficulties becomes sharply
relevant, and her supervisor who holds an evangelical belief in medical
science’s ability to treat
mental illness.
It was more concerned with dramatising a set of
questions than providing answers; obviously these are difficult issues, but I
wouldn’t have minded more of
an attempt at a ‘line’, particularly given that the play came
across a bit programmatic, albeit also quite committed to its characters as
real people and not just types mouthpieces for particular views.
(Leaving the Wharf Theatre, I saw a yellow and black sign beside the street: "ART AHEAD"; on the traffic island in the middle of the small roundabout ahead, a red sports car crushed beneath a large grey boulder.)
