Depression is a subject the theatre is obliged to confront. The big question is how you dramatise it. In Reasons to Stay Alive, based on Matt Haig’s book, April De Angelis set up a dialogue between the hero’s two selves. In this new American play, Jacob Marx Rice shows what happens when a manic and a depressive fall for each other; the result, while highly watchable, rarely shocked me into a new awareness.
Rice presents us with two characters. Steph is a long-term depressive who, having dropped out of Brown University, works in a bar. Jamie is a high-flying Washington-based student of foreign affairs who experiences unipolar mania that leads him to obsessive overwork. The pair meet at a psychiatrist’s office, are instantly attracted to each other and start dating. But when Jamie tells Steph he is in love with her, she warns him “I’m a destructive person – it’s who I am” and that their relationship can only end in one way.
The play, in Alex Howarth’s production, shows how a couple on different rhythms can bond physically and, at times, complement each other: when Steph senselessly breaks 200 glasses in her bar, Jamie’s management skills allow him to quickly repair the situation. Rice makes you like and care about the couple but never fully explores the treatment they are getting, and works on the assumption that depression is inherently incurable. It doesn’t help that much of the clinical information is gabbled into hand-held mics by the performers and is not easily comprehensible.
When they are not rushing their fences, the two actors are very good. Caoimhe Farren shows how Steph slides from being a sharp, witty, self-aware figure, who announces she “grew up in a family of chemical imbalances”, into a woman who suffers from a paralysing inertia. James Mear captures equally well Jamie’s determination to conquer his mania and his guilt-ridden powerlessness in the face of his partner’s depression. But at heart the play is a love story more remarkable for its tender compassion than for what it reveals about mental illness.
At the Finborough theatre, London, until 23 November.
