What is madness? A state of mind or simply a social construct? Is it always mad to be mad or simply the sanest response to an insane world? Why are writers so fascinated by the subject? How do we know if we are bananas? Over the next 10 weeks the Gate will be attempting to grapple with some of these questions, with a season of work that looks at the state of mind we are in.
It is a good idea but it falls at the first hurdle with this devised piece. A Box of Bananas begins promisingly enough: designer Soutra Gilmour has transformed the theatre space into a labyrinth, with higgledy-piggledy seating and a row of hooks on a stainless steel surround. On entering, the audience is asked to hang up all coats and bags. Divested of our safety mechanisms and bits of our identity we are plunged into an Alice in Wonderland scenario: the cast wander around in their pyjamas, telephones ring, voices whisper and the conscious and unconscious walk hand in hand.
The 80-minute show draws heavily on the work of RD Laing, Jorge Luis Borges and Anais Nin and feels like a throwback to the student theatre of the 1970s. It is slickly crafted and performed but seems no more specifically about madness than it is about the relationships between men and women and the anxiety they engender. It is not long before the persistent tone of mild hysteria begins to pall.
Far too much of the evening concentrates on personal angst and paranoia, ignoring the collective madness of nations or the way countries such as the former USSR treated dissidence as madness.You only have to look at the disproportionate number of black and Asian people treated for mental illness in Britain to deduce that madness isn't all inside our heads and can't be separated from the society in which we live.
Until October 6. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
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