It was possible to have double vision while watching Patrick Marmion’s play about the self-healing commune created by RD Laing in London’s East End in the 1960s. In the audience on the night I went were David Edgar and Patti Love who, respectively, wrote and starred in the play, Mary Barnes (1978), about the artist and writer who famously benefited from Laing’s unorthodox methods and features in the current work.
While Marmion’s piece is commendably ambitious, it suffers from an excess of dualities. Wittily subtitled The Two Ronnies, the play captures the endless contradictions within Laing himself: both radical psychiatrist and media celeb, advocate of collectivism and rampant egotist, creator of the community centre, Kingsley Hall, and resident of Hampstead.
In two adventurous but arbitrarily inserted scenes, Marmion contrasts the last night of Laing’s commune in 1970 with the present. In one episode, a volatile inmate time-travels to 2015 to discover that potential revolution has been replaced by a technological nightmare full of walking zombies. In the other, Laing confronts a thriving alter ego who shows how faith in self-healing has been absorbed into a more conventional, drug-driven treatment of mental illness. Intriguing as those scenes are, they smack of editorialising.
In the end, however, the play records an open verdict on Laing who is viewed as both original thinker and damaged messiah. Alan Cox captures all of Laing’s complex charisma and suggests that inside the cosmopolitan intellectual lurked a Glasgow street-fighter. There is good support from Kevin McMonagle as Laing’s fiercest internal critic, Oscar Pearce as a rampaging Trotskyite inmate, Amiera Darwish as Laing’s pregnant partner and Laura-Kate Gordon as the indefatigable Mary Barnes. Michael Kingsbury’s production does full justice to a play that leaves one, like its subject, deeply divided.
• At Arcola, London, until 12 December. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
