Inside Out: Seymour Centre

As a child, I lived next door to a sufferer of schizophrenia. Often he’d spend hours, literally hours, in his room, which was along the side of the house next to ours, shouting, ‘I hate you Mrs Beal and I’ll never be your friend.’ Over and over, until his voice was breaking. Over and over, at this woman he’d never actually met. My mother. And I, at the tender age of four or five, was the ‘Son of Satan’ (in reference to my future career as a reviewer, no doubt). As a child, growing up, at first I found these outbursts frightening; then, as I got older, funny, then tiresome. I suppose teenagers find everything a bit of a drag.

In Inside Out, Simon, who suffers from schizophrenia, is a teenager himself. It’s more than a drag for him, however. It’s a nightmare, a bad dream shared by his mother, Sue, who watches helplessly on as her son becomes a stranger in her house. An aspiring artist, Simon draws all over the walls of their living room, sketching frantically, desperately, at three in the morning with the stereo turned up to full blast. His father, Sue’s husband, is absent, physically and emotionally. Together, they’re totally alone.

Mary Rachel Brown’s script is a striking piece of work and surely deserves the Rodney Seaborn Award she received for it. It has its flaws, I think, particularly in its treatment and pacing of the play’s final passages, but its humorous and dramatic elements are very well meshed and much of the writing is vividly poetic. At times I even thought I could hear echoes of Shakespeare in a couple of the monologues, most notably during Simon’s plea to the audience at the beginning of play (shades of ‘And, as I am an honest Puck’), and later on in Sue’s story about getting her hair cut (‘Out, damned spot!’). Moreover, I heard echoes of my neighbour’s voice in Simon’s abstractly logical, stream-of-consciousness ravings. For me, Brown’s fluid prose in these scenes was breathtakingly authentic and real.

Tracy Mann takes on a very difficult role with Sue, requiring her to be convincing and natural as a mother trying to be convincing and natural around her troubled son, and not exactly pulling it off. Mann does pull it off, however, quite a feat, and her performance becomes increasingly nuanced and absorbing as the character develops from a secondary, supporting role into an equally compelling lead. Lindsay Farris’ performance is really the front-and-centre focus though, and he manages to make Simon by turns endearingly vulnerable, charming, manically deranged and tragically, heart-wrenchingly broken. Once the show closes, he’ll probably have to sleep for a month.

Reflecting Simon’s mental state, the stage gradually deteriorates from an orderly living-room setting into a chaotic mess, a definite triumph for director Tom Healey and set designer Imogen Keen. It also becomes less of a literal space, more symbolic (i.e. during phone calls, towards the end the prop telephone is abandoned), which again seems like a good idea but arguably doesn’t quite work in execution, with the lack of a clear sense of setting at times seeming unintentional and undermining the drama slightly. Nicholas Higgins’ lighting is nevertheless very effective in conveying the shifting mood of the story and Kimmo Vennonen’s sound design, which I found intrusive and often irritating, is terrific precisely because it’s intrusive and often irritating. The voices laid underneath the music are, likewise, hauntingly effective.

When I think back on my neighbour now, all these years later, at last my feelings have settled into a mixture of sympathy and sadness. And I feel lucky. I feel lucky not to be among the 1% of Australians afflicted with schizophrenia, which is a greatly misunderstood, misrepresented illness. I also feel lucky to have seen Inside Out – although they say you make your own luck. All you have to do in this case is contact the Seymour Centre and buy a ticket.

Inside Out: Seymour Centre

Bookings:02 9351 7940