East End Review

Tag: Arcola Theatre

Human rights play to shed light on ‘biggest unreported war story of our time’

Workshop for The Island Nation

The final phase of the 26-year conflict in Sri Lanka between government forces and the rebel Tamil Tigers is the biggest unreported war story of our time, according to human rights theatre company Ice and Fire.

Their new play, The Island Nation, is set in Sri Lanka during the latter years of Asia’s longest-running civil war, a conflict which is thought to have claimed the lives of 100,000 people.

Playwright Christine Bacon wrote the play, which opens this month at the Arcola in Dalston, to address what she calls a “black hole in history”.

“It’s one of those things that seems to have passed the world by and it really shouldn’t have,” says Bacon when we meet in her Bethnal Green office.

“I think people know snippets: they’ve heard of the Tamil Tigers, or maybe they’ve been there on honeymoon, but the final stages of it were extremely brutal in terms of the extent of human suffering.

“It’s something that in any other context would have been headline news.”

The Sri Lankan Civil War began in July 1983 with an armed insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers).

The Tamil Tigers wanted to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north and the east of the island.

The conflict ravaged the population, environment and economy of Sri Lanka.

In 2009, after two decades of fighting, with several failed peace talks and false dawns, the Tamil Tigers were defeated.

In that same year, Bacon recalls international outcry at the bombing of civilians in Gaza.

She compares it to the situation in Sri Lanka. where civilians were bombed “indiscriminately” with nothing reported and only a muted response from the UN. So why the disparity?

“There’s multiple reasons why and that’s what this play delves into and tries to address,” says Bacon.

“Sri Lanka is basically an authoritarian country and way down on the press freedom list. It’s one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist so dissent on a domestic level is very rare, and the media weren’t even reporting it in Sri Lanka itself,” Bacon says.

The play, partly based on true events, tells the story of Nila, a young Tamil woman trapped in rebel-held territory, and a British aid worker desperate to get her out.

“There are three strands to the play,” Bacon explains. “It looks at what was happening in the war zone and the people who were trapped there.

“Then there’s the role of the UN and how they basically shut their eyes and ears and hoped it was all going to end.”

The final strand of the play is the peace process itself. Norway was asked to mediate in the conflict, and one of the politicians who tried to broker the cease-fire is a character in the play.

“His involvement in the conflict spans around 10 to 15 years,” says Bacon.

“So the play begins in around 1999 and goes up until 2009. It compresses a lot into an hour and a half.

“But for an audience that has no idea of what was going on in Sri Lanka you have to give them that history about where the conflict came from, who the Tamil Tigers were and what that wrangling was all about before you go into what happened at the end.”

The civil war officially ended in 2009, but that doesn’t mean that the minority Tamil population are still not suffering human rights violations, Bacon stresses.

“Freedom from Torture, a UK charity providing clinical services to torture survivors, has reported The Sri Lankan Tamils as the highest proportion of their case load for many years since the conflict ended,” she says.

“There was a cut off point but the abuses and the human rights violations certainly have not stopped – our play ends with a nod to the fact that it isn’t over.”

The Island Nation
26 October – 19 November
Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL
arcolatheatre.com

October 13, 2016
Grimeborn Festival, Arcola, review: ‘excellent programme of rarities and standards’

Roger Paterson and Nick Dwyer perform in Mozart and Salieri at Grimeborn Festival

The Grimeborn festival is an amazing venture: over seven weeks the visitor to the Arcola can see – if they’ve got the stamina – 16 shows for as little as £10 a throw (with a ‘passport’).

As implied by the tongue-in-cheek name, it is no luxurious experience; but it succeeds in getting opera back to its experimental roots.

Consider Fire Ring, a genuine rarity – a 1930 opera produced by London Armenian Opera (which makes it sound like we have been missing a large repertoire all these years). In truth, the music in this opera is not that great with a repetitive style.

The plot is a puzzle and does not reveal why such ill-starred lovers from opposite sides of the conflict should bond so deeply. But the production has tremendous brio, not least from the spirited chorus who stand Greek-like above the fray.

Mozart and Salieri is a gem. Peter Shaffer’s play is well known as is the overacted film Amadeus, but few realise these pieces derive from this short opera by Rimsky-Korsakov with a libretto by Pushkin.

With such talented progenitors, it is no wonder that the original has a humanity and gentleness that the more theatrical variants don’t have.

The medium of opera works so well as the music gradually shifts back and forth between Rimsky-Korsakov’s long tones and sharper Mozartian passages. Depending on just two singers (outnumbered by the three instrumentalists), it keeps an intimate tone.

Grimeborn still needs to deliver the standards, the operas that people have heard of that get bums on seats. These productions come with danger in that they are intended for the opera house, but in the Arcola large voices can drown everything out, as Natasha Jouhi does in title role of Tosca, and where the single piano can make the opera sound like a silent movie.

In fact, pianist Richard Leach brings out the tenderness in Puccini’s music, and Stephen Aviss as has a classic tenor voice, which he reins in carefully. The production is spare, but it does not matter. Why all the dry ice – surely the Napoleon’s cannons are a long way off?

The Marriage of Figaro is even more of a stalwart and Opera24 & Darker Purpose deliver a solid production that conveys the right amount of energy and delivers the necessary comic timing. There is no need for much of a set though; the imaginary doors being opened are a bit irritating.

The parts are clearly sung – the loose English translation produced vernacular phrases that made the audience laugh. The star of the show is Sofia Troncoso as Susanna, who has a supple voice and acting ability.

For a bit of silliness, The Perfect Picnic, with its send up of opera and the middle classes, starts well. But the jokes wear thin – it could have been done in an hour like other short pieces in Grimeborn’s excellent programme.

Grimeborn
Until 10 September
Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL
arcolatheatre.com

August 23, 2016
Grimeborn returns for tenth anniversary at the Arcola

Béla Bartók’s entrancing masterpiece, Bluebeard’s Castle. Photograph: Brent Eviston

Flying in the face of opera’s reputation for being overpriced, elitist, and long-winded, the Arcola Theatre has launched its tenth-anniversary Grimeborn festival.

The festival offers new works and reinvigorated classics in both theatrical and outdoor spaces around Hackney.

This year’s event, a rather grittier alternative to the prohibitively expensive Glyndebourne, is presenting sixteen new pieces of music theatre from the sublime to the psychopathic.

The festival opened with a production of Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, translated from Bela Balasz’ original Hungarian text, and performed in one-act. Daunted? Don’t be.

Following its huge success at the Olympic Park last year, this contemporary production was performed for free, outdoors, at none other than Gillett Square, where a cast of community performers manipulated huge, over-sized puppets through this dark tale of blood, tears and unruly husbands.

The setting for opening night was an impressive statement of intent for the seven weeks of festival to come, where almost every ticket is £15 or less and many of the shows come in under the hour mark.

That’s not to say that the rich majesty of some of opera’s more heavyweight material is not represented at Grimeborn 2016.

With Puccini’s classic Tosca, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, there is plenty to enjoy from the canon, revitalised for a contemporary audience.

The Hive is a work-in-progress showing of a new piece about psychopathic behaviour and the people who seek it out. The production is directed by Bill Bankes-Jones, who runs the Tête-à-Tête contemporary opera festival.

For anybody who saw the award-winning show Wot? No Fish!!, the closing event of the festival will be one to look out for.

In his most successful work, Danny Braverman recounted the heart-warming story of a shoebox full of his great uncle’s wage packets adorned with sketches designed to entertain his wife.

Braverman has now penned a musical for Grimeborn based on the songs of Labi Siffre. Something Inside So Strong opens in the first week of September.

There are specially-priced tickets for those 16 and under, suggesting most productions are suitable for young adults. It’s also worth noting that many of the shows run for only a night or two so best to book early.

Grimeborn
Till 10 September 2016
Arcola Theatre
24 Ashwin Street
Dalston
E8 3DL

 

July 29, 2016
Play set in ‘shipping container’ highlights plight of child refugees

Cargo: refugees attempt a border-crossing in Tess Berry-Hart’s new play

Just minutes from the ‘Refugees are Welcome Here’ sign on Dalston Lane, a mocked-up shipping container is being set up in the basement of the Arcola theatre.

This month a new play called Cargo will tell a story that reflects the plight of as many as 90,000 children who have fled to Europe from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea.

The play enacts a border crossing in real time, in a replica of the type of container many have already used to attempt a crossing. The play focuses on two young refugees amongst the group inside – but no one inside the container knows who they have got in there with.

Playwright Tess Berry-Hart, who also founded the charity Calais Action, said she was compelled to write the play after meeting a 12-year-old boy on her first trip to the refugee camp in France.

“The police were tear-gassing and some of the tents were being bulldozed,” she recalls. “I met this kid. He’d come across the Sahara in a truck, to Italy in a wooden boat, then travelled with smugglers to Calais.

“I was so frightened by what this meant for the world, that 12-year-old kids were travelling on their own with gangs of desperate people.”

The number of unaccompanied minors seeking refuge in Europe is not known for sure. The European Asylum Support Office said 85,482 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in 28 EU countries (plus Norway and Switzerland) in 2015, a number that is likely to have risen this year.

Berry-Hart’s background is in verbatim theatre – her latest play used interviews with gay Russian citizens to expose the extent of homophobia there. She says the toughest bit about writing this play was making something pacy and compelling without it coming across as “preachy”.

“The play’s set in a closed space and closed time,” she explains. “So trying to get everything out about the backstory of the characters, the arc of their journeys, the conflict of the play, and what happens in the container within the actual journey time – without it looking pushed or unnaturalistic – is quite a challenge.”

Although the stories in the play are fictional, they have been produced after dozens of conversations with refugees, and the cast and crew have also benefited from consultation with people who have actually experienced such crossings. The methods refugees use to get inside crates, how smugglers treat them and what happens when they get caught, were all taken from first-hand accounts.

But its thrilling plot aside, will Hackney theatre-goers choose to spend a summer evening sweating under stage lamps? One hopes, for the source material, they will.

Cargo is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 6 July – 6 August.
arcolatheatre.com

July 1, 2016
Kenny Morgan, Arcola theatre, review: ‘a worthy tribute’

Paul Keating (Kenny) Pierro Niel-Mee (Alec) in Kenny Morgan at the Arcola Theatre. Photogaph: Idil Sukan

A young man, lying inert beside his gas stove following a botched suicide attempt, is the dismal opening sight to this play by Mike Poulton. The young man is Kenny Morgan, a one time rising star in British cinema and for a period the lover of Terence Rattigan. The past decade has seen his acting success and affair with the celebrated mid-century playwright flourish, then fall apart.

Kenny is conflicted and vulnerable, torn between two romantic recourses: Terence, played by Simon Dutton, who is passionate for Kenny but as a celebrity must keep him hidden from the public eye; and Kenny’s flatmate Alec Lennox (Pierro Niel-Mee), a bisexual fellow actor whose devil-may-care attitude exudes boyish charm and a capacity for heedless cruelty. As Kenny’s career hits the rocks, he faces the choice – to be Terence’s concubine or fall prey to Alec’s caprice. The question is can the people around Kenny (his well-meaning neighbour Dafydd Lloyd or the rationalist ex-doctor Mr Ritter) convince him that life is worth living?

Kenny’s problems are compounded by the times, for in this post-war era suicide and homosexuality were criminal acts. The play does a stellar job of conveying the social mores and emotional reticence of 1940s Britain, warts and all. We are privy to moments of prejudice, such as Alec’s grotesque impersonation of a Jew. Despite this, the play is very funny, and there is black humour, buffoonery and sly digs at the audience throughout. Marlene Sidaway in particular is a delight as the fussy, chastising landlady Mrs Simpson.

Set in Kenny’s shabby Camden flat, strong performances from the cast and a neat, uncomplicated plot make the two hours plus whiz by. The events which unfold supposedly inspired Rattigan’s greatest play, The Deep Blue Sea. However, this is not primarily about the playwright’s tryst with Kenny Morgan – it is a detailed expose on a sensitive, isolated young man’s grounds for killing himself. Mike Poulton’s play displays all the fragility, savagery and capacity for good in human nature, and is a worthy tribute to Kenny’s tragic fate.

Kenny Morgan is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 18 June
arcolatheatre.com

June 3, 2016
Sheer Height redress the gender balance with new Arcola show

The Sheer Height company on-stage. Photograph: Thomas Scurr.

In a draughty pub somewhere south of the river I discuss gender inequality in theatre over a cup of tea with actors Jenny Wilford and Charlotte Couture.

The pair are the founders of Sheer Height, a feminist theatre company which this month is holding a one-day festival, Women Redressed, at the Arcola.

Showcasing new writing from UK playwrights, as well as excerpts from established plays, the festival aims presents theatre that plants female characters firmly centre stage, and which probes perceptions and expectations of gender.

Despite our shivering, the conversation was heated. A few years out of drama school, the actors are disillusioned with the roles they are consistently offered.

“It’s a saturated market, so it’s hard to get in the room to audition, for starters,” says Wilford. “But what always frustrates us are the parts we see coming up time and time again; we’re still seeing recurrent casting calls for the romantic interest, the mother, the sister – always family or romance or sex, in relation to a male lead.”

“In the 19th century, Henrik Ibsen wrote really strong, interesting female protagonists,” Couture offers. “And then at some point it kind of fell apart…” adds Wilford, wryly.

Couture and Wilford are brimming with facts about gender inequality in theatre. “Did you know 2008 was the first time the National Theatre staged a female playwright’s original work on the Olivier Stage? Or that The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie – the longest running West End show – is frequently the only play written by a woman staged in the West End?”

Dissatisfied with the state of their industry, Couture and Wilford took matters into their own hands. In 2014 they set up Sheer Height, naming it after Shere Hite, a feminist known for her pioneering work on female sexuality.

Since forming, the company has staged a sell-out performance of Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic and November last year saw the inaugural Women Redressed festival at the Arcola. It was a sell out success, leading Couture and Wilford to bring it back for another outing this month.

The actors believe that, as women in drama, their work is inevitably politicised – though they believe it shouldn’t have to be. “It’s a difficult balance,” says Wilford. “Female playwrights and actors just want to work without labels or having to be political… but also – we want to make some progress here!”

“We have clear guidelines for script submissions,” says Wilford. “The idea is to have female characters at the core of the plot, which itself should explore gender issues and challenge perceptions.”

“We really think about what we’re presenting in terms of having a diverse programme,” says Couture. “Last time we had plays about abortion, domestic violence, sex work, the office environment, same-sex relationships… but we also put on plays about female friendship – and, you know, about women just having a good time! I think that in itself is really empowering.”

In light of cuts to the arts, Wilford and Couture believe now is a particularly troubling time for women in theatre. “Lack of funding means theatres are very reluctant to take risks. So, often, they’re going with safe options – which usually means commercial productions, established plays and the same revivals over and over again,” says Wilford.

Women Redressed
20 March
Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street,
E8 3DL
sheerheighttheatre.co.uk

March 17, 2016
A Steady Rain, Arcola – review: two cops in an ‘armpit of a place’

Vincent Regan in A Steady Rain at the Arcola. Photograph: Nick Rutter

Set in downtown Chicago in the “not too distant past”, A Steady Rain sucks you in.

Denny and Joey have been best friends since childhood and are now partners in the police force.

This pair of beat cops would do anything for each other.

“I don’t want you going back to that armpit of a place and giving it to the bottle,” Denny says when trying to keep Joey away from “the sauce”.

When a “lowlife” injures Denny’s son in an act of revenge, Denny goes off the rails and takes the law into his own hands. Joey steps in to support Denny’s family and rifts surface between the friends.

Written by Keith Huff (House of Cards and Mad Men), A Steady Rain debuted on Broadway in 2009 with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig.

In the London debute, both Vincent Regan as Denny (300, Troy, Clash of the Titans) and David Schaal as Vincent (The Office, The Inbetweeners) are also strong enough to convince that a play with just two characters can enthrall for a full two hours.

They successfully rescue the plot when it veers too close to the good cop–bad cop dichotomy.

The simplicity of the set works well with the pace of the plot as it switches between the present, flashbacks and direct narrative. A table and two chairs double up, amongst other things, as a sofa, kitchen table and police van.

Weather as a metaphor is a familiar device. But when rain begins to fall across the back of the stage, the audience nevertheless feels the oppression. And the sense of relief when it finishes, just as the plot resolves.

Where the play treads a little too close to cliché, the production and acting sustains it.

A Steady Rain at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 5 March.
www.arcolatheatre.com

February 19, 2016
Playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz: ‘I think the fear of the outsider is still present’

Trials and tribulations… Hannah Hutch (Ann) and Amanda Bellamy (Jane) in Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern. Photograph: Richard Davenport

The fascinating story of one of the last witch trials in England is the inspiration for a play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, opening this month at the Arcola.

Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is based on the true story of an old woman who narrowly avoided execution after being accused and convicted of witchcraft in the Hertfordshire village of Walkern in 1712.

Jane Wenham was a ‘cunning woman’, a type of healer who used herbs to ward off illnesses. But after crossing certain members of the village she was accused of witchcraft and arrested. The trial caused a sensation in London, provoking a pamphlet war, while the village itself was caught between those wanting to save her life and those claiming to want to save her soul.

Lenkiewicz, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning film Ida, and whose play The Naked Skin was the first by a living female to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, was approached by Max Clifford-Clark from theatre company Out of Joint and asked if she wanted to write about Jane Wenham.

“I looked into it and thought it was fascinating and said yes,” says Lenkiewicz, a former Hackney resident who now lives in Leyton. “Although I’ve taken a few events and let it spring from that really because what interested me more is how it still resonates today.”

Arthur Miller famously used the Salem witch trials to comment on McCarthyism in The Crucible, and Lenkiewicz similarly uses the story of Jane Wenham to draw parallels to the present day.

“She was an outsider Jane Wenham, she lived on the edge of the village and I just think that fear of the outsider is very much still present. You see it with immigration, people terrified of anything or anyone coming into their territory. It’s not just modern it’s historical, and crippling in many ways.”

Wenham’s outsider status Lenkiewicz believes can be attributed to her age and gender. Part of it, she says, was economics – the idea of communities not wanting people who weren’t contributing anymore.

“But also it was mainly women who were prosecuted,” she says, “so I suppose my question would be what terrifies men about women that at that time they would put them into torture corsets and gag them?”

Lenkiewicz’s plays often – though not exclusively – focus on women’s stories, from her debut play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers (the first production to be staged at the Arcola, back in 2001) to 2008’s Her Naked Skin, a tale of the struggles facing two suffragettes before World War One.

Lenkiewicz feels keenly that women are hugely underrepresented in film and theatre, and tries to redress that balance. Her most recent film script is about the Second World War allied spy Noor Inayat Khan, a radio-operator in Nazi-occupied Paris who was sent to Dachau and murdered. “She was an incredibly brave young woman, and you just want to bring out the story lest we forget,” Lenkiewicz explains.

This desire to give women who have been silenced a voice explains Lenkiewicz’s anger at the cancellation of a performance of Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern at a girls’ school in Ipswich last October, where it was due to be staged as part of regional tour prior to the London run.

Ipswich High School for Girls cancelled the performance after learning of the play’s “references to child abuse”, something Lenkiewicz dismisses as censorious and evidence of a “nanny state mentality”.

“I just thought it was a sign of our bleak nanny state times that they were forbidding 15- or 16-year-old girls to watch something that was incredibly pertinent to them,” she says.

“One of the main characters is only 16 and a very confused female. I just think it’s an apt piece to see for anyone who’s going through that maelstrom of change really of profound change.”

Lenkiewicz, who is now in her mid-40s, explains that her intention was always to tell Jane Wenham’s story, but that the writing process brought to light more instances of silencing and oppression towards women, the most terrifying of which being child abuse. “Kids are told they shouldn’t tell, and we should be addressing that – we shouldn’t be shutting these conversations down,” she told The Stage.

The irony that a play dealing with the hysteria and the oppression of women should be deemed inappropriate was underlined when Lenkiewicz received a letter from a 15-year-old girl who had seen the play in Watford.

“It was a very heartfelt letter saying how it had helped her in many ways and that she thought it was essential viewing for young women and that it was about empowerment,” Lenkiewicz recalls.

“If I was directing this play towards anyone it would be a young female contingent because it’s all about having a voice really.”

Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 30 January
arcolatheatre.com

January 7, 2016
The Divided Laing review – inside the mind of a psychiatrist

Alan Cox and Oscar Pearce in The Divided Laing. Photograph: Adam Bennett

Part of the appeal of madness for dramatists is the way that uncontrolled unconscious appetites and desires are thought to lurk so closely underneath the conscious, rational, socially acceptable world of everyday life, threatening to burst through at any minute.

Against the Apollonian forces of order and moderation struggle the wild and terrible Dionysian passions; behind the flimsy face of every unassuming Dr Jekyll is a ravening Mr Hyde.

Patrick Marmion’s new play at the Arcola, The Divided Laing, turns this fertile dichotomy on its head. It’s 1970, and the doors of perception are wide open: at any given time, someone on stage is either drunk or high on acid, or fighting, or all three.

The setting is Kingsley Hall, the counter-cultural anti-asylum set up by Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D. ‘Ronnie’ Laing as a place where, as Laing saw it, any sufferer of mental illness could come and be treated as “a person to be accepted, not an object to be changed”.

Madness – and its embrace as valid, perhaps superior, experience – is the order of the day. But manifesting at every turn are the Apollonian, Jekyll-style forces of sensible, normal, well-adjusted life, appearing in various guises: as policemen and pub landlords; as the suggestion of new ‘house rules’ for Kingsley Hall; as Laing’s elderly mother, insisting he return to the five children he has abandoned in Glasgow; and as a medical seminar happening in 2015, visited by Laing during an acid trip to the future and which through its multi-disciplinary, detailed, considered and intelligent discussion of the case in question, sounds the death-knell for everything he stands for.

At heart, The Divided Laing (subtitle: The Two Ronnies), is a sort of domestic farce, with Laing and his followers and patients staving off one crisis after another as they await the arrival of Sean Connery, who’s coming for dinner. (According to Marmion, this really happened, and it’s a nice detail – James Bond is British culture’s Dionysian hero, always drinking and chasing girls, never following the rules, always saving the day; Laing as imagined here is similar, and continually introduces himself with the formula “the name’s Laing, by the way. R. D. Laing.”).

It’s a laugh several times a minute, and if some of the historical irony of the 2015 trip stands out as a bit cringe (“they have this thing, what do they call it, ‘Google’”), it’s because Marmion’s good ear for a comic cadence is usually so perfectly shared by the play’s brilliant cast, with Alan Cox, for instance, as Laing, so accurately landing the gulp for air in a resigned, hyper-erudite line like “he means, Mary, is it too late to resist the glacial slide towards medicalised psychiatry and universal state funded compliance reinforced by a fiscal model of the patient as economic unit – or not?” as to make it laugh-out-loud funny.

The real life Laing died 26 years ago, at the same time as Communism was collapsing. Mourning for Kingsley Hall, as for the Eastern Bloc, is misplaced; but it is also foolish to look back triumphantly on both failed experiments and think how naïve their instigators must have been.

That overestimates our own wisdom. Marmion has done us a good turn with this play, as a reminder that all our radical clarity will in its turn appear comical.

November 25, 2015
Was R.D. Laing a mental health pioneer or a dangerous maverick?

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Illustration: Paul Coomey

It is 50 years since the Philadelphia Association housed itself at Kingsley Hall in Bow, and 45 years since the Hall closed its doors amid local residents’ discomfort and a sense that things had got out of hand.

For the five years in between, the East End was witness to a radical experiment in treating mental illness, orchestrated by a charismatic group of doctors who eventually attracted the name ‘anti-psychiatrists’ for their rejection of mainstream psychiatric practices, most especially the use of drugs in treatment and the traditional power relationships with patients that characterised the profession.

Doctors and patients lived under the same roof at Kingsley Hall, and were collectively known as ‘residents’. Non-doctor residents were encouraged to make symbolic expressions of their illnesses through art, especially painting, and through talking to doctors in long conversations that respected the way patients used language, and engaged with it on its own terms. In the psychiatric world outside, lobotomies had only recently ceased to be the rage and it was not yet unknown for civil rights activists and feminists to be compulsorily confined to asylums.

The driving force behind the Kingsley Hall institute was the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Born into a poor family in Glasgow in 1927, he was successful at school and went on to study medicine, qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951. Called up to National Service, he served as an army psychiatrist for two years before returning to Glasgow, where he first worked with schizophrenic patients. He developed new approaches to treatment, which laid less of an emphasis on controlling patients and more on doctors and nurses spending time with them.

Having moved to London to study psychoanalysis, he published The Divided Self, an account of his new theories, in 1960. The book presented case studies of some of his patients and argued that mental illness could be seen as the outcome of a struggle between a ‘true’ inner self and a false self presented to the world, and that madness, far from being a medical condition, could be a logical response to the contradictions of the surrounding world. It’s still in print.

“Is love possible?” he asked in a BBC interview. “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person, do persons even exist?”

Kingsley Hall was to be a place where people could live without these contradictions. The most famous resident was Mary Barnes, a prolific and accomplished painter who developed her artistic career at Kingsley Hall in the sixties and continued to produce work until her death in 2001. With Joseph Berke, her therapist, she produced a book, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, and Laing contributed copy to her exhibition catalogues.

“There was a lot of colour there,” says Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail theatre critic and author of a new play opening at the Arcola this month about the closing months of the Kingsley Hall experiment. “Laing styled himself as a Glaswegian street fighter almost, a really colourful, charismatic person who was ferociously bright. And he gathered around him some extraordinary characters,” explains Marmion.

Joe and Shree by Mary Barnes, painted in Kingsley Hall. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

Marmion’s play is set in the Hall’s last crisis days, Laing’s administrative headaches exacerbated by the return of one of his colleagues from “an acid trip to the future” in which he has seen how low the reputations of everyone involved are to sink. Laing became a symbol for a new counter-cultural approach to mental illness throughout the sixties and seventies, and it is as a symbol that his legacy has been judged.

Despite distancing himself from the term, it is he who has become most closely associated with the label ‘anti-psychiatry’, although better candidates might be his colleague David Cooper, who coined it, or Thomas Szasz, the American psychiatrist whose books include The Myth of Mental Illness. Anti-psychiatry has been widely and justly debunked, most forcefully by the left-wing academic Peter Sedgwick in his 1982 book PsychoPolitics, in which he pointed out that the movement’s critique of established mental health services was being used to justify huge cuts to funding. By the eighties, mentally ill patients were at much greater risk of neglect than of over-zealous medical intervention.

However, the symbol of Laing is changing again and being disentangled from anti-psychiatry. He is increasingly celebrated now as an early champion of compassionate treatment for the mentally ill, and also as a poet (his book of dramatic verse Knots was made into a play in 2011, while the half-centenary celebrations have recently seen live performances of his other well known collection Do you love me?). Marmion’s play is in this mode. His favourite Laing quote, which appears in the play, is Laing’s saying that patients were “not objects to be changed but people to be accepted”. The time may have come for us to again accept R. D. Laing.

The Divided Laing is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 18 November – 12 December. www.arcolatheatre.com

Kingsley Hall today. Photograph: Russell Parton

November 12, 2015